The Photographs of the Finished Job

The photographs are genuinely beautiful. He takes them himself, at the end, in the afternoon light, and he has gotten good at it over the years in the way a man gets good at anything he does two hundred times.

There is one from a kitchen in March that people stop on. He has had three jobs out of that one picture.

Emilio is thirty nine.

There is a wall in that kitchen with a run of pipe behind it that he did not do the way he would want it done. Not dangerous. He wants that clear and he means it, and he would not leave a thing dangerous and he never has. It is that the client's budget ran out in a particular week and the choice in front of him was to have a hard conversation or to make a decision quietly and absorb it, and he made the decision quietly, and it is behind the drywall.

He thinks about it maybe once every two weeks.

He is a believer and a serious one. He prays in the truck in the mornings. His name in that town is genuinely good and he earned it honestly over sixteen years.

He just knows what is behind that wall.

If that is your job, this is written for you. And I want to hand you a verse with a metallurgy word in the middle of it, because the word is not about finding a fault.

Try the reins is an assay

Here is the verse.

I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways.

Try the reins. Now, reins in that old English means the kidneys, which in Hebrew thought were the seat of the deepest and least accessible part of a person, the place further in than anybody could reach.

And try is a metallurgy word. It is what you do to metal with heat to find out what it actually is.

Here is what matters about that, and I want to be exact because it changes the whole picture. An assayer is not looking for a flaw. That is not the job. An assayer is establishing worth. He heats a sample in order to find out what proportion of it is the real thing, so that a true value can be put on it, and the whole procedure exists to answer the question: what is this actually worth.

He is not hunting for a fault to disqualify a sample. He is finding out how much gold is in it.

You are being assayed for worth rather than examined for fault. Jeremiah 17:10 uses the refining word rather than any word for inspecting or accusing, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written assay and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands on a tailgate.

And that matters enormously to a man in this trade, because a man who works with his hands has a working relationship with the idea of inspection that is not neutral. Inspection means somebody coming to find what is wrong. That is what an inspection is for and any tradesman will tell you so.

An assay is a different visit entirely. Nobody assays a thing they intend to throw out.

You have somebody establishing your value rather than compiling a list. It is written as a refining rather than as an inspection, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written assay into a life, which is why it holds sitting on a tailgate at the end of a day.

According to his ways

Then the last clause, and I do not want to dodge it, because it is the part that sounds like a bill arriving.

Even to give every man according to his ways.

That does read like a reckoning and there is a real sense in which every one of us will give an account, and I am not going to soften Scripture to make an article warmer. That would be dishonest and you would find me out.

Here is what I will say about it, and it is not a dodge.

The verse puts the assay first. Search the heart, try the reins, and then give according to his ways. The order is not decorative. Whatever giving happens, it happens after a procedure whose entire purpose is accuracy, run by somebody who wants the true figure and has no interest in a wrong one.

Which means a man who has been quietly running his own reckoning for years, on his own evidence, without the assay, has been issuing a verdict that the verse does not authorize anybody to issue. Including him. Especially him.

You are not authorized to run your own reckoning, and the verse puts the accurate procedure before any giving. Scripture orders the assay first and the giving after, and the same Spirit at work in that passage is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where it cannot be skipped. If the once every two weeks has become more often, if the thinking has gotten heavier than one run of pipe deserves, if the nights have been getting long or the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in your faith. God has always worked through people, and one across a table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

The photograph is not a claim

Now the thing I most want to say, and I want it plain because I think it has been sitting on a good man for a while.

The photograph is not a claim.

A photograph of a finished kitchen is a photograph of a finished kitchen. It is a record of what that room looks like, and that room does look like that, and every person who has stopped on that picture has seen something true.

It is not a sworn statement about every fixing behind every surface in that house. Nobody has ever taken it as one. No client has ever understood a portfolio photograph as an affidavit, and if you told one that you had lain awake over the implied warranty of an image they would look at you strangely and then say something kind.

There is a real thing to deal with behind that wall. I am not saying otherwise and I am not going to tell you what to do about it, because that is between you and God and possibly a phone call, and it is not mine to direct.

But the picture is not the sin. The picture is a picture, and a man who has started reading his own good work as an accusation has lost something he was entitled to keep.

You made something genuinely good, and the record of it was never a testimony about anything else. Jeremiah 17:10 puts the assay on the heart and never turns a man's work into the evidence, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you the thing behind the wall gets settled this month or ever, or on what terms. That is not mine to promise or to prescribe.

You are clean right now with the pipe exactly where it is, and the wall has never once been the thing being assayed. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.