The Drawer With the Key He Kept

The last hour of a Friday in that shop is mostly sweeping and giving each other a hard time, and Nando enjoys it more than almost anything.

He is fifty-eight and he is halfway through handing the whole place over.

Eighteen months, this has taken, and it is going well, which surprises everybody including him. Two younger men, one of whom he taught from seventeen and one who came in from somewhere else and is better than both of them at the electrics and knows it. The paperwork is done. The name over the door changes in the spring.

He is genuinely glad. That is worth saying because it is unusual. There is no bitterness in this and no clinging, and when people ask him how he feels about it he says, honestly, that he is looking forward to a Tuesday morning where nobody needs him.

The key board is on the wall by the office door. Every key in that building is on it. Roller doors, compressor room, the container out the back, the cabinet with the diagnostic kit that costs more than his first house. All of them are on hooks, all of them are theirs now, and he handed each one over deliberately, one at a time, over a year and a half, and he did not make a performance of any of it.

Except one.

There is one key that is on Nando's own ring, in his own pocket, and it has been there for as long as either of the younger men has been alive. It opens the second drawer of the bench at the back, the old bench, the one nobody uses because the vice is loose and there is no power to it.

If you asked him what is in that drawer, he would say tools. And he would be, in the narrowest possible sense, telling the truth.

At twenty past five he is going round doing the last of it, and he goes past that bench and puts his hand down and tries the drawer.

Not to open it. To check it is locked.

He does that every single evening. He has done it for years. He does not think about it and he has never once mentioned it and if you filmed him he would look like a man brushing his hand along a bench on the way past.

You have that drawer. Yours is not in a workshop and I am not going to guess what is in it. But you know your hand goes to it, and you know you are not opening it, you are checking.

The biggest question anybody ever asked, and the answer

There is a man on a road with letters in his pocket and a plan for the week, and the plan comes apart in the middle of the afternoon, and out of the dust he asks the largest question in the New Testament.

And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.Acts 9:6

Lord, what wilt thou have me to do.

That is the whole thing. That is a man on the ground handing over the entire contents of his life in one sentence, with nothing held back, in front of witnesses, at the worst moment he has ever had.

And look at the answer.

Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.

Get up. Walk into town. You will be told.

That is not the answer to the question he asked. He asked for everything and he was given a street, a destination and a wait, and the rest of it, which turned out to be the most consequential life in church history after Christ, arrived in pieces over about thirty years.

You have been given a next step, and the answer to the total question is not a total instruction. That is the written word and not my comfort at a bench, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an exchange on a road outside Damascus and lays it in a workshop at twenty past five on a Friday.

He had a plan, and the reply was a journey and a wait

Notice what that man was carrying when it happened. He had letters. He had authority. He had an itinerary and a list and he knew exactly what he was going to do for the next two weeks and probably the next ten years.

He was, in other words, a planner, handing over to a God who does not answer in plans.

And this is the thing your drawer is actually about, and I say it carefully because I have watched it in men for a long time.

You are not afraid He will take what is in there. You have handed over an entire business over eighteen months without a flicker. You know how to give a thing away.

What you are afraid of is the answer. That if you actually say it out loud, what comes back is a total instruction, a complete reorganization, everything at once, delivered in one sentence, with no way back.

And the road at Damascus says: that is not how He answers. The man who handed over everything got a street name and an instruction to wait, and three days later a nervous man called Ananias knocked on a door.

This is yours, and He answers a whole surrender with one next thing, and it is already settled. Acts 9 says it shall be told thee what thou must do in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who sent Ananias down that street is the one making it a present fact in a man checking a drawer on his way past.

Let me guard this properly.

I do not know what is in your drawer and I have not guessed and I will not. There is no list in this article and there never was going to be.

And you have not forfeited anything by the years it has been locked. That man on the road had spent his adult life doing serious damage and God's opening move was to ask him to get up. There is no penalty in this for the length of time. If you cannot say it tonight, He is not colder about you on Monday.