His Fathers Tools

The chest is red and it has nine drawers and every one of them is labeled on masking tape in his father's handwriting.

Sockets metric. Sockets standard. Files and rasps. The tape has gone the color of weak tea and the ballpoint has faded on two of them, and there is one drawer where the label peeled off years ago and nobody ever replaced it because everybody in the family knows what is in it.

It is Thursday evening and his daughter's bike is upside down on the bench with the chain off. He does not read the labels. He has not read a label on that chest since he was eleven. His hand goes to the third drawer for the 9/16 the way your hand goes to a light switch in a house you grew up in, and the drawer rolls out on the particular hesitation that runner has had since before he could drive.

His father has been gone four years. The hammer at the back of the bench has a wooden handle worn into a shape, and two initials burned into the wood with a soldering iron in 1974 because men in that shop stole from each other.

On Wednesday, after the study, in the church parking lot with the doors open and the interior light on, a good man he has known for six years said a thing. He said it gently, because he loves him. Can I ask you something, and do you ever think, with all of that stuff of your dad's out there, that maybe you are still holding on to the old life a little. All things become new, right.

He said yes, probably, and thank you for saying it. He drove home. He has thought about it for twenty six hours.

And now he is standing in his own garage with the door up and the moths coming in, hand flat on the front of the third drawer, not opening it, working out whether a good man's kind question means that loving his father, and using his father's wrenches, is a piece of an old life a serious believer would have gotten rid of by now.

You know that drawer. Yours might be a recipe card, or a language you speak on the phone with your mother, or a photograph, or a trade you learned from somebody. And you know the question, asked kindly, by somebody who meant well, that you have not been able to put down since.

The coat he picked up out of the dirt

Let me take you to a riverbank, because there is a man in Scripture who lost his father in the faith and had to decide, that same hour, what he was allowed to keep.

Elisha had already burned his plow. Years before, when Elijah threw the mantle on him, he was behind twelve yoke of oxen, and he slaughtered a pair and boiled the meat over the plow gear and fed the people and walked away from that occupation for good. The man knew about leaving.

Then comes the day at the Jordan. Chariot of fire, whirlwind, his master gone up, and Elisha standing alone on a riverbank tearing his own clothes. Watch what he does next, because it is the first act of the rest of his life.

He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan.2 Kings 2:13

He picked a coat up out of the dirt. An old coat, a dead man's coat, the coat of the life that had just ended. He did not leave it lying there as a matter of principle. He bent down, took it, went back to the water, and struck the river with it, and the water divided.

You are looking at a man whose brand new ministry began with him holding something old in his hands. 2 Kings 2:13 is the verse the story turns on, and the Spirit of God saw fit to keep that detail in the record forever, which He does not do with details that do not matter.

Notice what got left and what got taken. The oxen got left. The plow got left, and it got burned, and it never came back. The mantle came along. There is a difference between the two and the difference is not sentiment, it is who was serving whom.

You have not been asked to arrive empty handed, and you never were. His word shows a prophet crossing into his whole calling carrying an inherited coat, and it is the Holy Spirit who tells a man which is his plow and which is his mantle, because the two look alike from the outside.

What actually passed away

Now the sentence that got quoted in the parking lot, and it deserves a careful hearing, because your friend was not making it up.

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.Romans 6:6

Read the last four words. That we should not serve. The language is slavery all the way through that chapter: masters, servants, wages, freedom. What went to the cross was a dominion. A regime. The thing that used to give the orders. It is not a filing cabinet of a man's memories and it is not his family and it is not a red tool chest.

You were freed from a master, and a master is not the same object as a history. Romans 6:6 puts the whole thing in the language of service and ownership, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a man free in fact and not only on paper.

And the record backs it. Paul was struck down on a road and rebuilt from the ground up, and he kept making tents with his hands for the rest of his life (Acts 18:3). He kept his citizenship and used it out loud in front of a centurion (Acts 22:25-28). He stood in Athens and quoted a poet he had read as a boy (Acts 17:28). Peter kept his boat, and Jesus sat down in it and preached out of it (Luke 5:3). None of them showed up new by showing up blank.

You are carrying things God intends to use, and some of them came from your father's hands. It is written that the Lord turns the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of undoing that line.

An idol and an inheritance are not the same weight

Now let me be fair to the man in the parking lot, because he was not wrong that there is such a thing as an old life to leave. There is. I would not stand here and pretend otherwise.

An object can hold a place only God is allowed to hold. There are people who consult a thing, who could not bear its loss, who are governed by a chest of drawers as surely as a man is governed by a bottle. That is real, and the honest question is not whether you own it. It is whether it owns you.

I am not going to answer that from here. I do not know your garage and I do not know your grief, and a man who ministers by long distance guesswork is a menace. What I will tell you is that it is a real question with a real answer, and the one who knows it is God, and He is not shy about telling a man the truth when the man actually asks.

You are free to ask that question without the answer being decided in advance against you. Scripture invites a man to be searched and to be shown, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that searching, gently, in a garage, without shaming anybody.

And here is the part I want to say slowly, because it is the part your friend did not mean to touch. Under the tools is a man you loved. The wrenches are not the issue and were never really the issue. There is a father under there. Grief attaches itself to objects because objects hold still, and a hand on the front of a drawer at nine at night is not idolatry. It is a son.

You are allowed to have loved him, and it was never a rival to God. His word is the place where a whole commandment stands over honoring a father, and the Spirit who inspired that commandment did not repeal it at the funeral.