The Shed I Do Not Need

He has been building it since April and it is going to be the best shed on that road.

It has a proper concrete pad. It has a floor that would take a car. He has cut the rafters to a pitch that is more than the span needs, and he has done the corners with a joint that took him two evenings to learn off a video, and there is a window in the back wall that he made the frame for himself because the bought ones were not square.

Nobody needs this shed.

There is a shed. There has been a shed for nineteen years, and it holds everything that has ever needed holding, and it is fine.

His father died on the eleventh of March.

He has not said very much about that and he is not going to, and that is his business and it stays his. What he will tell you, if it comes up, is that it was not sudden and that they had said what needed saying and that he is all right.

And then he goes out after work and works on the shed until it is too dark, most nights, six or seven days a week, since April.

He is forty six. His wife has stopped asking him to come in.

Here is what he noticed on Tuesday, and it is why this is being written. He was setting out the last of the roof and he got a thing wrong, a small thing, an inch and a half on a batten, and he stood there and his hands were shaking and he could not work out why a batten would do that.

And then he understood, standing in his own garden in the half dark, that the batten was not doing it.

The grief has no shape. That is the whole of it. It will not sit still and it has no edges and it arrives at the wrong hours in the wrong sizes, and there is nothing in it that a man can measure, or cut, or square up, or finish.

A shed has corners. You can make a corner true.

You know the shed. Yours may be a garden or a car or a run of night shifts. But you know what it is to give something edges with your hands because the thing that actually needs holding has none, and to have been doing it for months without ever deciding to.

The deep was not asked to square itself up

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this lands on the shed it will do nothing.

The pit is not the building. It is that the only thing you have ever been able to do with something formless is give it a form, and the thing in you since the eleventh of March cannot take one, and you have carried on giving forms to whatever is nearest because stopping would mean standing still in something with no edges. And a man like you has never once in his life stood still in something with no edges.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible. Read it as slowly as you have ever read anything.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Without form. Void. Dark. Nothing to measure, nothing to square, no corner anywhere in it.

That is not written as a problem to be solved by the water. It is written as a state, calmly, the way you would report weather, and then the sentence turns and tells you what was over it.

The word for what the Spirit was doing is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and over her young. A bird over a nest. Not measuring it. Over it.

Here I teach one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, the way it would beside the word for a hand or a house. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female; Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture reaches for a father's traits and a mother's both to tell you who He is, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.

Take that with your hands still shaking, and know it is not my sympathy, it is the second sentence of the Bible. You are being brooded over in a thing that has no shape, and it does not need one before He will come near it. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit over the deep first, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been over you since the eleventh of March, in every hour you were out in that garden after dark.

And the next verse tells you where shape comes from, once and for all.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

From above the water. By a word. The deep did not square itself up and was never asked to, and there is nothing in that chapter where the water is thanked for cooperating.

You are not required to square this up before He comes near it, and you were never going to build corners for a thing that has none. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit moving over a formless deep exactly as it was, and it is the Holy Spirit who hovers over grief that will not take a shape.

Grief was never a thing you were supposed to give edges to. That is not permission to fall apart and it is not an instruction to talk about it; it is the plain order of the first page, and it is the Holy Spirit who broods over formless things, which is what He is for and what He was doing before anything on this earth had a corner.