The Trade I Left At Twenty Two

You trained for it. Properly. Four years, or three, or however long it was where you were, and you were good enough that they kept you on at the end of it.

Then something happened. The place closed, or a child arrived, or somebody offered something steadier with a pension attached to it, and steady is not a small thing when there is a family in the house.

So you took the steady one and you have been there since, and the trade got put down.

And now the month is short and the question on this page is what you could be paid for, and you go through the list in your head and your own trade is not on it, because in your head it belongs to a young man who is no longer you.

You are not a man who lost a trade, and thirty years away from a tool have never once taken the training out of a pair of hands.

I want to be honest rather than encouraging, because a man who trained in something can tell the difference.

Some of it will be gone. The speed will be gone. The current way of doing it will have moved on, in places, and there will be materials and fittings and standards you have never touched.

But that is not the same as the training being gone, and I think you have been treating them as the same thing for a long time.

The axe head that came off in the water

There is a small account in 2 Kings that almost nobody preaches, and it is about a working man losing his tool.

But as one was felling a beam, the axe head fell into the water: and he cried, and said, Alas, master! for it was borrowed. (2 Kings 6:5, King James Version)

For it was borrowed.

That is the detail. The man is not upset about the wood or the day. He is upset because the tool was not his, and a poor man who has lost a borrowed tool is in real trouble.

You are looking at an account where a working man's trouble with his tools was taken seriously, and a matter of iron and water has never once been too ordinary for God to attend to. It is written in 2 Kings 6:5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept a story about a lost axe head in the record at all.

And what happens next matters for you. The iron is brought back up to where the man can reach it. He is not given a different axe. He is not told to take up another line of work.

The thing he already had, and had lost, comes back within reach of his own hand.

You have a thing that went down out of sight rather than a thing that was destroyed, and something laid aside has never once been the same as something taken away. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a thing back up where a man can reach it, and the written word tells that story about a tool rather than about a doctrine.

What actually stays in the hands

Let me be practical, because you will not accept a sentimental version of this.

What goes, with thirty years, is speed, current practice, and the fine tuning that comes from doing it every day.

What stays is deeper than that, and this is not a poetic claim, it is how training works. What stays is the judgment. Knowing when something is wrong before you can say why. Knowing which step comes next without reading it. Knowing what a bad job looks like at ten paces.

That layer was built between eighteen and twenty two and it does not come out.

You are carrying the part of the training that took the longest to build, and judgment in a trade has never once been the part that fades first. The written word has a man's own tool restored to him rather than replaced, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings back what a person actually had.

And there is a second thing, and it is the one that surprises men who go back to it.

The years since were not a gap. You have spent three decades in another line of work learning things that a twenty two year old tradesman does not have. How to talk to people. How to deal with a customer who is difficult. How to be somewhere on time for thirty years.

You have two sets of things in your hands and have only ever counted one of them, and years spent elsewhere have never once been a subtraction. The Holy Spirit is the one who counts a whole life rather than one season of it, and it is written that the iron came back up to a man who had gone on working in the meantime.

Say it as a trade, not as a memory

So the assignment, and the wording is the whole of it.

Say out loud the one thing you are genuinely good at, and name one person who needs it. 2 Kings 6:5 has a working man's own tool brought back within reach, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man permission to say what he was trained to do.

And the rule for the sentence is this. Present tense.

Not I used to be a joiner. Not I trained as a welder a long time ago. I am a joiner. I am a welder. And then: and I could do that for somebody.

You are able to put a trade in the present tense in your own mouth, and a tense has never once been a small thing in the sentence a man uses about himself. The Spirit of God is the one who gives that plainness, and the written word does not describe the man in 2 Kings as a former woodcutter.

And one name. Somebody within reach this week who actually needs that thing. Not a firm. A person.

You have somebody in mind before you have finished this paragraph, and a name that arrives that fast has never once been the wrong one to begin with. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings the name forward, and it is written that the trouble was noticed by the man standing next to him.