The Reed That Was Not Broken

Rangi can still mend a net. It takes him about four times as long as it used to and his hands do not behave, and he can still do it.

He was the fast one. That was his whole standing in that family for forty years. If a net came in torn on a Thursday, Rangi had it back in the water by Friday, and there was a period in the eighties when three other boats used to bring him theirs.

The tremor started about four years ago and has done what tremors do.

He stopped going down to the jetty for most of last year. He told everybody it was his back. It was not his back.

What it actually was, and he has said this out loud exactly twice, is that he could not stand to be watched being slow at the one thing he had ever been fast at, in front of people who remember.

His granddaughter Mere is eleven and does not remember, which turns out to be the whole point.

She started coming down with him in the spring because she wanted to and nobody could talk her out of it, and she has no memory of him being fast, so she has nothing to compare it to. To her, this is simply how her grandfather mends a net, at this speed, with these hands, taking breaks.

She holds the mesh for him. She is very serious about it.

And in June, sitting on that jetty with the light going long and gold across the water, she asked him to teach her the knot, and he did, and it took an hour and a half.

He said afterwards that in that hour and a half he was not slow. He was just teaching. The clock had come out of it entirely because there was nothing to be slow against.

He goes down most days now.

You may be waiting to be set aside as well. Something has changed in your capacity, and you can still do it but not the way you did, and you have started managing where people can see you. And nobody has said out loud to you what happens in Scripture to the one who is no longer much use at the thing.

The Two Things Named Are The Two Things Nobody Keeps

There is a description of the Servant in Isaiah that names two specific objects, and both of them are things any sensible person would throw away.

"A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth."Isaiah 42:3

A bruised reed is a reed that no longer works. A reed pipe with a crack in it does not sound right, and the standard practice is to snap it and cut another one, because reeds are everywhere and the river is full of them.

Smoking flax is a wick that has gone out and is producing more smoke than light. The standard practice is to pinch it and put in a new one.

Both of these are ordinary, sensible, unsentimental disposals of things that have stopped performing.

And the sentence says: not this One.

You are the object named in that verse rather than the exception to it. Isaiah 42 chooses the two most obviously discardable things a person could think of and states plainly what He does not do with them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sits it on a jetty beside a man with a tremor.

And notice that it is not sentimental. The verse does not say He mends the reed or relights the flax. It says He does not break it and does not quench it. It is a statement about what He refuses to do, which is a much sturdier thing to stand on than a promise about restoration, and it holds even on the days when nothing gets better.

You have not been marked for disposal, and the refusal is written into a description of His character. That is what the written word says about the ones who are no longer performing, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive in the hands rather than in the head.

The Clock Was The Thing, Not The Hands

Now the part Rangi worked out on a jetty in June, and it is worth having.

He was not suffering because his hands shake. He was suffering because he was measuring today's hands against 1987's hands, continuously, in front of an audience he had assembled in his own head out of people who mostly were not thinking about him at all.

What his granddaughter did was remove the comparison, by having no access to it.

That does not fix a tremor. Nothing in this article fixes a tremor. What it does is take the clock out of the room, and once the clock is out of the room a man mending a net is a man mending a net.

And here is the wider thing, and it is not a trick of perspective, it is a fact about how God works: nowhere in Scripture is a person's worth to God calculated from their output. Not once. Not for the strong ones and not for the ones who used to be.

You were never being valued by the rate. It is written that we are His workmanship, which places the value in the making rather than in the production, and His Spirit is the one who has been on that jetty the whole time including all of last year when nobody went down.

And say the guard, because this is where a good word turns into a demand. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No output, no attempt, no attitude, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work at all. If you never mend another net, you are exactly as much His sitting in the house, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming another standard for somebody who is already grieving a capacity.