The Lord showed me this image. His hands were slowly sewing a leather shield over a heart.
Leather work cannot be rushed. You mark the line, punch one hole, pull the thread through, and then do it again. Shield makers worked this way for hundreds of years, laying leather over a wooden frame until the thing could stop an arrow. None of them came off the bench in a day.
He is making something that has to hold.
The labels come early and they keep coming. A diagnosis sits on a file and reaches the room before you do. Someone says a word in a corridor, thinking you had already left. A voice shifts when a person hears which medicine you take, or how long you have been unwell. Whatever else those words are, they are aimed, and they land in the same place every time.
A heart with nothing over it will harden itself. That is what hearts do when the blows keep coming and no cover arrives. It thickens. It stops looking for kindness, grows a shell, and the shell works well enough to get the person through the year. Something dies in there that God had wanted to use.
He puts the hardness on the outside, so it never has to grow on the inside.
Isaiah describes a man who took the beating and the spitting and did not go hard.
"I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting. Because the Sovereign LORD helps me, I will not be disgraced. Therefore have I set my face like flint, and I know I will not be put to shame." (Isaiah 50:6-7)
Flint is stone. He set his face like stone, and his face is the part of him that meets the crowd. The hardness went there and no further.
He did not hide his face either. You carry a shield toward the trouble. This covering keeps you in the room, close enough to be hit, still there when the shouting ends.
In verse seven the help arrives before the flint does. He does not toughen himself in order to be safe. He is already helped, and the hard face comes after.
Everything that held him was given two verses earlier, before anyone had laid a hand on him.
"The Sovereign LORD has given me a well-instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed. The Sovereign LORD has opened my ears; I have not been rebellious, I have not turned away." (Isaiah 50:4-5)
His ear was open. It opened again the next morning, and the morning after that. Everything the crowd threw at him stopped at his face and never reached his hearing.
God wakes him early and teaches him, so that later in the day he has something to say to a tired person. The purpose was given before the suffering came.
Your soft heart has work to do. The man in the next chair has heard every cheerful thing that well people say, and he believed none of it. He needs the part of you that can still feel what he feels. God guards that part. He will not take it away to make you safer, and he will not let the labels have it.
So the sewing stays slow. Rushed leather tears along the seam.
Some days the stitching has not reached the spot where the word lands. It goes straight through, and you feel all of it. Nothing has failed on those days. The needle has not come round to that part yet.
You woke this morning and your ear opened. His hands are still on the work.
This is a song inspired by this text. May you be blessed by it.
