He worked it out about four years ago and has never said a word about it to anybody.
The phone goes and it is one of them, and before he has even said hello he knows, because there is a particular way they start. There is a hello with a small run up in it. Hello, how are you, are you busy, and then a pause of about half a second, and then the thing.
The gearbox. The roof over the back kitchen. A tree down across a gate. His nephew's van, twice in one winter. A pump. A boiler that a man had already been out to and had not fixed and had charged for.
He goes every time. He is not building to a grievance and he is not going to stop going.
He is sixty one and he has been the man who fixes things in that family since he was about twenty two, and he is good at it, and there is a real satisfaction in it that he would not want anybody to take away.
Here is the pattern he worked out on a Tuesday four years ago, sitting in the truck outside his sister's house with a wrench in his hand, and it is arithmetic and not a complaint.
In eleven months, at that point, he had received nine phone calls from his own family. All nine were about something broken.
Not one of them was about nothing.
He has never had a call from any of them that was somebody ringing because they thought about him. Not one, in four years of counting, and he has kept counting, which he is faintly ashamed of.
And what has grown out of that is not anger. It is quieter and more permanent. He has come to understand himself as a number that is kept somewhere for a certain kind of afternoon.
You know the pattern. Yours may be a workplace or a street or a church. But you know what it is to be reliably called and never simply wanted, and to have done the arithmetic once and never been able to un-know it.
Cut into a hand, not kept in a drawer
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes a case against your family it will be useless to you and unfair to them.
The pit is not that they use you. They are not using you; they are doing what families do with the one who can fix things, which is ring him when a thing breaks, and every one of those nine calls was a real problem and you were the right man. There is nothing to prosecute.
The pit is the conclusion. A man who is only ever called for eventually decides that being called for is what he is, and after four years that stops being an observation about phone calls and becomes a fact about his worth, and a fact about his worth does not stay in a truck outside his sister's house. It goes with him everywhere, including into prayer.
Here is the verse.
Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:16
Graven. That word is not written. It is cut. It is what a mason does to stone, and it does not come off, and the place He put it is not a drawer or a book or a list. It is the hands.
Think about what that means for a man who has been kept as a number. A thing on a hand is not somewhere you go and look when a situation arises. It is in front of you constantly, on the part of you that does everything else, and it is there when nothing at all is happening.
And the verse before it takes the measure of that.
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15
Now I want to be careful, because there is a lazy way to read that clause and this article is not going to take it. God is not making an accusation about anybody's mother, and He is not inviting you to go back through your own family for evidence. He picks the strongest bond in the world He made, says that even that is capable of failing, and then plants Himself past it.
Here the line goes in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 49:15 is a comparison God chose to say something about His own remembering. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture reaches for a father's language constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.
Take that in the truck, and know it is not my sympathy, it is what is written. Your name is cut into the hands of God and it is not filed under emergencies. Isaiah 49:16 puts it on the hands and not in a drawer, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a sentence like that down into the place where a man has been keeping his own arithmetic for four years.
You have been asking a question in a truck with a wrench in your hand and getting no answer, and the reason you get no answer is that you have been asking your family. They cannot answer it. Not because they do not love you, but because the answer you need is not one that arrives by telephone.
You are wanted and not merely called upon, and you were never on His hands as a repair number. Isaiah 49:16 cuts a name into a palm rather than storing it against a fault, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets that into a man who worked out the pattern years ago and never said so.
So take the question to the one place it has already been answered in writing.
You are remembered by God when nothing is broken. That is what a name on a hand means, and it is Isaiah 49:16 read exactly as it stands, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a man on an ordinary afternoon when the phone has not gone.
And here is where I want you to feel the shape of it. The whole of your usefulness is real and none of it is being taken away. You are the man who fixes things and that is a good thing to be and there are people warm and dry tonight because of you.
It is simply that God did not put your name on a list of tradesmen. He cut it into the hands that made everything, on the part of Himself that is doing everything else, permanently, where He does not have to go and look.
Nothing about your family has to change for that to be true, and it was true through every one of those nine calls, and it was true in the eleven months.
I am not going to tell you one of them will ring for nothing next week. I do not know that. What I know is what has already been done with your name and where it is kept, and it is not in a drawer, and it never was.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the truck with your name on your hand. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over four years of arithmetic is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on anybody ringing you for a different reason. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by any phone call. What happens with your family, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Pattern I worked out four years ago and never said, you are not how God keeps my name, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 49:16 says He has graven me on the palms of His hands, which is cut in and not filed anywhere.
- Understanding of myself as a number kept for a certain kind of afternoon, you have no ground in this truck. It is written that they may forget, yet will He not forget thee, and His Spirit is the one who carries that below the counting, which is where it went.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female and You have cut my name into Your hands. I have written it on my own palm and read it out loud over the top, and I am remembered by You on the afternoons when nothing at all is broken.
Isaiah 49:16
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