My Father Would Have Fixed This

He would have had it open on the kitchen table by Tuesday.

That is the picture, and it is very specific, and it has been in the room every time this has been thought about since the weekend. The newspaper down first. The screws going into a jar lid. The particular silence he worked in.

And he would have fixed it, or he would have decided it could not be fixed, and either way there would have been no five days of this.

And you are going to call somebody.

Which is a completely reasonable thing to do, and which you have not yet done, and the reason you have not yet done it is standing right there on the kitchen table with a newspaper under it.

Because calling somebody is not just calling somebody. It is a small public statement about what kind of man lives here, made to an audience of one man who has been dead for eleven years and is somehow still in the room.

So that is what this is about, and the machine is almost incidental.

You are a man calling somebody who knows how and not a man failing his father, and picking up a phone has never once been a smaller thing to do than picking up a tool.

My strength is made perfect in weakness

There is an answer Paul got that he did not want, and it is one of the few places where God explains His own method.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9, King James Version)

My strength is made perfect in weakness.

Read that slowly, because it is easy to hear it as a consolation prize and it is not one. It is a statement about mechanism. It says the place where God's strength comes to full expression is the place where the man is short.

Not in spite of the weakness. In it. That is what the sentence says.

You are standing in exactly the place where the verse locates the strength, and a gap in what a man can do has never once been the place God's power avoids. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man looking at a phone on a Friday evening, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts the perfecting inside the weakness rather than after it.

And notice what Paul had actually asked for.

He asked three times for the thing to be taken away. He wanted to be a man who did not have this particular limitation. And the answer he got was not the removal, and it was not an explanation, and it was not encouragement to try harder.

The answer was: my grace is sufficient for thee.

Sufficient. Enough. Not enough to get you through until you become capable, which is how it is usually heard. Enough, full stop, as a permanent arrangement.

You have been given something described as sufficient rather than temporary, and a grace that is enough has never once been a grace that was waiting for you to improve. The written word records the request refused and the grace given instead, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that an actual relief in a kitchen rather than a phrase.

And there is one more thing, and it is about the man in the memory.

Your father had a set of abilities. They were real and they were useful and they belonged to a particular life, in a particular time, with particular tools in a particular garage. They were his.

They were never the measure of a man. They were the shape of one man.

You are a different shape from the man you keep measuring yourself against, and one particular set of abilities has never once been the standard for what a man is. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a measuring stick out of a kitchen, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 locates a man's sufficiency in grace and not in his capabilities.

What the call actually is

Something practical, and it is about what is really being said when the phone gets picked up.

Calling somebody who knows how to do a thing is not an admission of failure. It is the ordinary transaction that holds an entire society together. A man who can fix a machine cannot do what you do all day, and you would not think less of him for that for a single second.

You are making an exchange rather than a confession, and paying somebody for what they know has never once been the same as admitting that you should have known it. The written word has Paul receiving what he could not supply himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a man receive something without ranking himself over it.

Here is the second thing, and it is the harder one.

The voice in the room is probably not actually your father's. Think about what he would genuinely have said, rather than what the voice says. Most men of that kind, asked directly, would have said: get somebody who knows, do not make it worse.

The voice is a construction. It was built out of watching him work, and out of being a boy who could not do what he did yet, and it was assembled by a child rather than issued by a man.

You have been listening to something you built as a boy, and a voice assembled out of a child's watching has never once been the voice of the man who was actually there. The Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference in a kitchen on a Friday, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 has God speaking plainly rather than through an inherited standard.

And the last practical thing: do not explain it afterward.

When it is done and somebody asks, say I got a man in. Not I would have done it myself but, not I did not have the right tools, none of the small sentences that are actually addressed to the man on the kitchen table.

You are permitted to give a plain report and stop talking, and four words with nothing attached to them have never once been a man apologizing for his own house. The Holy Spirit is the one in the kitchen when the call is finished, and 2 Corinthians 12:9 says the grace is sufficient and adds nothing after it.