The Pipe Never Made a Drop

The torch beam finds the same three things it has found for nineteen years. The gate post with the split down the middle of it. The flat stone where the path turns and the grass goes silver. Then the low door of the spring house, frost on the hasp, and that smell of cold rock and moss which means the water is exactly where it has always been.

He does not slow down for any of the three. The young one walking behind him does, because the young one is still watching his own feet.

"Header first," he says over his shoulder, and he says it the way other men say their own telephone number. "Crack the washout a quarter turn. Wait until it runs clear, and you will know clear when you see it. Then the spur, then the farm, then back up here and close the washout before you go down, or you will hear about it from the farm by seven."

He has not thought about that sentence in about eleven years. It comes out of him whole, in order, in the dark, while his hands are busy doing something else entirely. That is what nineteen years does to a man. It takes a thing you once had to concentrate on and it moves the thing somewhere underneath thinking, and that is a mercy, and it is also the quietest danger a good worker ever meets.

At the back of the spring house the water comes out of the rock in a seam about the width of a hand. It has come out of that seam every day he has been alive and a great many days before he was thought of. It is not impressed by the valve order. It has never once been late, never once asked whether he was ready, never once needed him to know a single thing.

He stands there a moment with the torch switched off, the way he does, and listens to it.

You have your own version of that list. Yours might be the drug round, or the twelve steps of the handover, or the way you set the room out before anybody else arrives, or the four sentences you say to a frightened person on the telephone that work nearly every time now. You were slow at it once. You are not slow at it now.

And somewhere in the last year or two, without ever once deciding to, you stopped asking for it.

Getting good is not the fault

Let me settle one thing before we go any further, because I have watched this teaching land badly on people who did not deserve it.

Your skill is not the villain of this piece. Nobody here is going to ask you to be worse at your work, or to fumble something deliberately so that God has somewhere to move, or to treat nineteen years of hard won competence as a sin quietly committed in the dark. That is not the correction. It never was. The hands that learn were given to you by the same God who is being talked about in this article, and He has never once been embarrassed by a person who is good at something.

The correction is smaller than that, and much kinder. It is a question about where the water comes from. And the answer changes nothing at all about the pipe, except what the pipe knows.

You are carrying an assignment that was supplied before you were ever any good at it, and it is being supplied this morning while you read. I am not putting my own encouragement over you here. This is the plain sense of what the Lord said to a builder standing in front of a half finished house with not nearly enough men: not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit (Zechariah 4:6). The same Spirit who carried that sentence to Zerubbabel is the one standing in your hands at your work today, and He did not stop supplying you on the day you stopped noticing Him do it.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

The lampstand never made a drop either

That sentence did not arrive on its own. It came out of a vision, and the vision is worth standing inside for a minute, because it is the picture your whole working week is hiding in.

The prophet is woken up like a man shaken out of sleep, and he is shown a gold lampstand with a bowl on the top of it and seven lamps burning. Beside the lampstand there are two olive trees, one on either side. And when he asks what the trees are for, the answer he gets is that two olive branches are pouring golden oil through two golden pipes into the bowl (Zechariah 4:11 to 12).

Now think about what the lampstand actually does in that picture.

It burns. That is the whole of its contribution. It holds the flame up where the room can use it, it burns steadily, and it makes exactly none of the oil. The bowl does not manufacture. The pipes do not manufacture. Somewhere off to the side there are trees, and the trees do what trees do, and the oil comes along the pipe, and the lamp is never once asked to produce what it is spending.

You have been the lamp this whole time, and you have been burning on a supply you did not press out of anything. That is written into the vision itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who runs the pipe from the tree to the bowl in your case, quietly, whether or not the lamp is thinking about it. Nobody is asking the lamp to stop burning. We are only telling the lamp where the oil comes from.

Here is the mercy hidden in that. If the oil were yours, then a bad week would be a shortage. A tired year would be a shortage. Getting older would be a shortage. But the seam in the rock is not affected by how the keeper slept, and the trees do not consult the lampstand about the harvest.

And notice what the same chapter says about the size of the job. Who despises the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10). The word does not say the small day is a rehearsal for a bigger one. It says do not look down on it. Your Thursday is not a waiting room. It is the assignment.