I Put A Sheet Over It

The sheet was a good idea at the time.

That is worth saying first, because you have probably been treating it as evidence of something. It was not. It was a reasonable response to a real problem, which was that the unfinished thing was in your eyeline forty times a day and every look cost you something.

So you covered it. An old sheet, a drop cloth, a piece of board propped in front of it. And for about a week it worked, and that week was genuinely better.

Then something happened that nobody warns you about. The sheet became the thing you see.

Now you walk past a shape under a cloth, and the shape means exactly what the unfinished thing meant, and it means it without any of the useful information. Under the sheet there is a specific amount of work. Over the sheet there is only a shape, and a shape can be any size at all.

Which is how a man ends up worse off than he was, having done something entirely sensible.

You are a man who covered something in order to keep going, and a sheet thrown over unfinished work has never once been the same as giving up on it.

The covering cast over

There is a line in Isaiah about a covering, and about what God does with coverings.

And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations. (Isaiah 25:7, King James Version)

The face of the covering cast over all people.

It is a strange doubled phrase and the doubling is deliberate. Not the covering, the face of the covering. The thing you actually look at when something is covered. The surface of the cloth, which is what the eye lands on when the real thing is underneath.

That is precisely the trouble in your hallway. You are not looking at the job. You are looking at the face of the covering, and it has been standing in for the job for months.

You have been looking at the face of a covering, and a cloth over a thing has never once told you anything true about the size of what is under it. Isaiah 25:7 names the face of the covering as its own separate object, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell a man which of the two he has been staring at.

And now the verb, which is the reason this verse is the right one for a man in a hallway.

He will destroy it. Not lift it politely. Not ask you to lift it. The whole posture of the verse is that the covering is the thing that gets dealt with, and the dealing with it is done from the outside, by somebody who is not ashamed of what is underneath.

You were never expected to be the one who feels no shame about the cloth, and the removing of a covering has never once been something God waits to be asked about. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the face off a thing, and Isaiah 25:7 puts that action on His side of the transaction rather than on yours.

What the cloth is actually doing now

So here is the practical claim, and it is about arithmetic rather than about courage.

An uncovered job has a size. Two thirds of a wall. Four feet of trim. A door that needs one more coat. That size is fixed, and it is usually smaller than a man remembers.

A covered job has no size. It has become a shape, and the mind is extremely generous with shapes. It fills them with the worst available estimate and it updates that estimate upward every month nothing happens.

You are carrying an estimate and not a job, and a covered thing has never once stopped growing in the mind of the man who covered it. Isaiah 25:7 distinguishes the covering from what it hides, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a real measurement back into a house that has been running on guesses.

And there is a second thing, quieter and heavier.

The sheet is now the announcement. Everybody in the house knows what a sheet in that position means. The covering did not remove the subject from the room, it gave the subject a flag.

You have a flag in your hallway that you put up in order to take one down, and nobody in that house has ever once needed the cloth explained to them. The Spirit of God is the one who is present when a man sees what his own solution turned into, and the written word names the face of the covering as a visible object in its own right.

And none of that means covering it was foolish. It bought you a week, and you needed that week, and it did what it was asked to do.

You were buying time with that sheet and nothing worse, and a week of relief has never once been a dishonest thing for a tired man to want. Isaiah 25:7 goes after coverings without a word of reproach for anybody standing near one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a short term measure from a character flaw.

Take it off and leave it off

Here is the assignment and it is short.

Take the covering off tonight. All of it. Do not fold it back halfway, which is a compromise and compromises leave shapes.

Then fold it up properly and carry it out of that room. Put it in the garage, a closet, anywhere that is not where the job is. If it stays in the room it will be back over the work inside a week, and you know that.

You have hands that can carry a folded sheet into another room, and taking a covering off has never once obliged a man to start work underneath it. Isaiah 25:7 has the covering itself destroyed, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that hallway while a man does something that takes ninety seconds and costs more than it should.

And then leave it uncovered overnight. That is the part that does the work.

You will walk past it in the morning and it will be a job again instead of a shape, and it will be a specific size, and that size will probably surprise you.