The Yard He Left Me

Rubén had the letter in his jacket at the funeral.

That is the detail he cannot get past even now. The acceptance letter, folded twice, in the inside pocket of the suit he wore to bury his father, because it had arrived on the Tuesday and his father died on the Thursday and he had not had a chance to tell him.

Two years of evening classes to get there. Three references. A weekend of interviews in a city he had never been to, where a woman with kind eyes asked him what he thought the church needed and he talked for eleven minutes without stopping.

And by the following March he was running the yard.

Not because anybody made him. Because his mother could not, and his brother is in Tampa, and there were nine men on the books with families, and somebody had to sign for the deliveries on the Monday morning. He did it for a month and then for a season and then it was eight years.

He is good at it. He is better at it than his father was, which nobody says out loud. He knows what a floor will do in a cold house. He can tell you which of two identical looking pallets came out of a bad batch.

And every so often, usually in the winter, he thinks about the letter.

Tino is seventy-one and worked for Rubén's father for forty years and now works for Rubén, and calls him mijo, and will do until one of them dies.

They were sitting on the tailgate in November and Rubén said something about it. Not much. Just that he had wondered lately what would have happened.

And Tino, who reads more than anybody would guess from looking at him, said:

"You know what they called Him, in His own town?"

Rubén said, "What?"

"They said, is this not the carpenter. That is the line. Not the carpenter's son, that is the other Gospel. That one says the carpenter, straight out. And they said it to put Him in His place, mijo. It is an insult. It is written down in the book as an insult."

He had another drink of his coffee.

"Thirty years He was that. Thirty. And about three of the other thing. And the ones who knew Him best could not get past the fact that they had a table in their kitchen He had made."

Then he said, "You are sitting on a tailgate in a stone yard wondering if you missed your life. And the whole of heaven has been in a workshop already."

The word His own town used

Here is the line Tino was quoting, and it is worth seeing exactly as Mark wrote it, because Mark is not being sentimental about it at all.

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us? And they took offense at Him.Mark 6:3

That is a crowd reducing somebody. The tone is unmistakable: we know what you are, we know your mother, we know your brothers by name, and you are the man who fixed our door.

And they took offense at Him. Because a person who is that ordinary cannot be the thing He appears to be.

Now hold that against the fact that God chose it.

He did not arrive in a palace or a school. Of the years He spent on this earth, the overwhelming majority were spent in a workshop in a town of a few hundred people, doing joinery and stonework for neighbors who would later use it as the reason not to believe Him.

So hear this over you, on the tailgate in November. Your trade is not what happened instead of your life, and the yard is not a detour, because the Son of God spent thirty years in one and nobody in heaven regarded those years as a waiting room. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who was on Him in full through every one of those years in Nazareth, which is not a thing He would have wasted on an interval.

Now let me handle the letter, because I am not going to pretend it does not exist.

You may still do it.

The door that closed in a particular March did not close forever, and men and women start these things at fifty-two and at sixty-one, and if that thing is still in you, still specific, still refusing to settle, then get it in front of people who know you and let them speak into it. Nothing in this message is telling you the letter was a mistake.

What I am telling you is that the eight years were not a subtraction.

Because that is the arithmetic you have been doing in the winter, and it is wrong. You have been counting the yard as time removed from a calling. But look at what those eight years actually contain. Nine families kept in work. A mother who did not lose the business her husband spent his life on. A man of seventy-one who still has a place to go on a Tuesday and somebody who calls him by his name.

That is not the absence of a calling. Scripture says whatever you do, do it from the soul as for the Lord, and it makes no distinction anywhere between the man who preaches and the man who signs for pallets on a Monday. The Spirit of God is the one who assigns and places and gifts, and He did not lose track of you in that March.

Let me guard both sides one more time, plainly.

Ministry is real work and holy work and if He calls you there, go. And the yard is real work and holy work and He put you in it. Anybody who ranks them is selling something Paul never sold.

There was a man five hundred years ago who spent his early years being told that only certain people had a vocation, that a monk had one and a stonemason did not. He spent the rest of his life dismantling that, and he used this exact word about it: that the whole world is full of God's service, and the man at the bench is doing it as truly as the man in the pulpit, and God is not embarrassed by any of it.