The Back That Ended The Work

It is still on the nail.

Second nail along on the back wall of the garage, the one he put in himself with a lump hammer because the plasterboard would not hold anything. The belt is hanging off it the way he hung it up on a Friday afternoon in March, buckle down, the loops gone soft, the pouch still holding a stub of pencil and about nine screws he meant to sort out.

It has been there long enough now that there is dust on the top edge of it. Not much. Just enough that you would leave a clean line if you ran a finger along it, and he does not run a finger along it, because he does not go into the garage much any more.

He can tell you the exact lift. Everybody can. It is never the big one. It was a bag of sand off the tailgate, half turned, one hand, the kind of thing he had done nine thousand times without a thought in his head, and something in the lower right of his back let go with a noise he heard rather than felt.

Twenty-six years on the tools before that bag of sand. Now he is a man who takes a long time getting out of a chair.

And here is what nobody outside the house ever quite understands, so let me say it plainly on his behalf.

The pain is not the worst of it.

The worst of it is that the phone stopped. The worst of it is that he used to be the man they rang when it had to be right, and now he is somebody people are careful around. The worst of it is standing in the kitchen at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, dressed, with nowhere to be, listening to a house that has never been this quiet, and having no idea at all who he is supposed to be in it.

He would take the ache every day of the week if he could have the work back.

Now I am going to stop talking about him.

Because you have got your own nail on your own wall. Yours might be a nurse's fob watch in a drawer, or a pair of boots by a door that have not been on in two years, or a van somebody else drives now. And your body hurts, and it has hurt every day for a long time, and you have stopped mentioning it because you can hear how it sounds by now.

But the thing you actually cannot say out loud is that when your body went, it took the man or the woman you were with it.

Your worth was never in the lifting

I want to give you a verse, and I want you to notice what it is willing to admit before it comes anywhere near comfort.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Read the first half again.

My flesh faileth. That is a man saying, out loud, in a song they sang in public, that his body was giving out on him. He does not talk himself round it. He does not call it a season. He does not pretend that a strong enough faith makes a body behave. He says the flesh fails, because sometimes it does, and God let that sentence stand in the middle of the songbook forever.

So whatever you have been told or have told yourself in the small hours, hear this from me and let it settle: your pain is not a report on your faith. It never was. The Bible you are holding has a man's failing body written into it as a fact rather than a fault.

Now the second half, because that is where the ground is.

God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.

A portion is not a wage. That is the whole hinge of it. In that country a portion was the piece of ground your family was given when they came into the land, the inheritance that was yours because of whose you were and not because of what you produced. A man's portion did not go up in a good year and it did not disappear in a bad one. You could break your body on your portion and it was still yours, because it had been handed to you rather than earned by you.

And this man says: God is mine.

Which means the accounting you have been doing since the day of that lift has been done in the wrong currency. You have been valuing yourself in output. Hours. Call outs. The jobs nobody else could finish. Every one of them real, every one of them good, and not one of them the thing that makes you worth something to God.

He did not take you on for your back.

He is not now reviewing whether you are worth keeping on reduced hours.

You are not a man on the sick list in the kingdom of God. You are not a woman who used to be useful. Your portion has not moved an inch since the day it was given, and it does not know anything about the noise that bag of sand made.