BAR NONE RECORDS · DOC B TALKING HEADS, EPISODE 03

The long teaching behind the song — five lessons from a number two pencil.

BEAT ONE

Where This Came From

I want to tell you about a song, and I want to tell you about the sermon underneath it.

A few Sundays ago I sat in my church and listened to Pastor John Anderson preach a message called Leaving an Indelible Mark. I have heard a lot of preaching in my life. I have rarely walked out of a room and started writing in the car.

He opened with an object. Not an illustration he reached for halfway through — he opened with it, and he stayed with it the entire message. A number two pencil.

He told us why it’s called number two. Pencils are graded one through four by the density of the graphite. A number one smudges. A three and a four write too faint to read. Number two is the ratio that works. He told us why it’s a hexagon — because a round pencil rolls off a desk and a six-sided one stays where you put it. And he told us why it’s yellow. The design came out of Europe, but Europe had no graphite, so the makers went to China to get it. In China, yellow was the color reserved for royalty. The pencil came home wearing the color of a king.

The most ordinary object in the room. And not one thing about it was an accident.

Then he told us what that object built. Steinbeck outlined novels with it. The architects of the Empire State Building sketched that skyline with it. The first drawing of Mickey Mouse was made with a number two pencil.

Nobody remembers the pencil. The marks are still here.

He made five points. I wrote five sections. Here they are.

BEAT TWO

Lesson One — The Core, Not the Shell

A pencil in the box looks like every other pencil in the box. The yellow tells you nothing. The strength is not in the shell. It is in the core, and the core is not visible from the outside.

Anderson went to First Samuel sixteen for this, and notice that it is the passage where the prophet gets it wrong. Samuel is sent to Jesse’s house to anoint a king. Eliab walks in — the oldest, the tallest, the one who looks the part — and Samuel is ready to pour the oil. And God stops him. Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.

The one they anointed was out in a field with sheep. He was not invited to the meeting. His own father did not call him in.

I have spent my career in places where people are graded on the outside before anyone asks about the core — schools, clinics, workplaces, and a prison system. I can tell you from thirty years of it that the outside is the least reliable information we have about a person. It is simply the fastest.

If you have been sorted by your packaging, the sorting was not a diagnosis. It was a shortcut somebody took.

That is verse one.

BEAT THREE

Lesson Two — The Sharpener

A pencil that stays in the box never writes anything. Before it can make a single mark it has to go into the sharpener, and what the sharpener does is take a blade to the part that was protecting it. That is not gentle. The cedar that kept the core safe is the exact material that has to come off.

That is the line in the second verse. The pit and the prison and the empty room at night weren’t cutting me down — they were cutting me right. Cutting right is a woodworker’s phrase. It means a cut made to specification, at the angle the design calls for, rather than a cut that destroys. Same blade. Different intent. The sharpener is not hacking at the pencil; it is shaving cedar at precisely the angle that exposes the point.

Anderson took us to Joseph — the pit, the false accusation, the years in the prison — and to First Peter one, where faith tested by fire is called more precious than gold.

Now let me say the careful part, because I am a physician and I will not say something in a sanctuary that I would not say at a bedside.

Not every hard thing is refinement.

Some suffering teaches nothing. Some of it is damage, and the people carrying it have been handed theology that made it heavier. If you have been told your loss was a lesson God arranged for you, I am not going to repeat that to you, and I do not believe the text requires it.

What I will tell them is that they can do all things through Christ who strengthens them. Read Philippians four in context and you will see that is not a promise that the pain had a purpose. Paul is talking about contentment in abundance and in want. It is a promise about who is holding you while you are in it.

And still — there are trials you will have to go through, and going through them will benefit you and the people around you. James says count it all joy when you fall into trials of many kinds, because the testing of your faith produces patience. Notice that James names a product. Not a vague redemption. Patience, specifically.

Esther was told she had come to the kingdom for such a time as this, and the such a time in question was a crisis. Most people are not handed a purpose that arrives as an opportunity. It arrives as a gap. A problem. A thing that is missing that somebody has to go handle. If that is what is standing in front of you right now, it may be the reason you exist.

So here is how to tell the difference, and it is a question you ask in the past tense rather than the present. In the middle of a hard season, what is this teaching me is usually cruelty. Ask instead: what do I know how to do now that I did not know how to do before? That is an inventory, not a theology. Most people who take it honestly find something on the list, and the finding does not require them to say the blade was good.

That is verse two.

BEAT FOUR

Lesson Three — The Hand That Holds It

A pencil cannot write by itself.

It has substance. It has a core. It has every physical property required to leave a mark — and it will lie on a desk for a hundred years and leave nothing, because it has no intention. Intention comes from the hand.

Isaiah sixty-four, verse eight. We are the clay, and You our potter, and we all are the work of Your hand.

Anderson went to Moses at the burning bush, and Moses is a man arguing with God about his own résumé. I cannot speak well. And the answer was never a correction of his speech. The answer was: I am not asking you to be powerful. I am asking you to be held.

Here is the practical piece. The pencil does not argue with the angle of the stroke. It does not ask where the sentence is going or demand to see the paragraph. That is not passivity — it is the pencil doing the only work that was ever actually its own, which is being available.

Most of the anxiety I see in capable, high-functioning people is the anxiety of trying to be both the pencil and the author at the same time. You will not out-plan your own life. You are permitted to be the instrument.

That is the chorus, and the chorus repeats three times on purpose. Repetition is not a songwriting shortcut. It is how a sentence gets from something you agree with into something you believe.

BEAT FIVE

Lesson Four — The Eraser Was Installed at the Factory

Consider what the eraser actually means.

The people who made that pencil knew — before it left the building, before it was ever sold, before you ever picked it up — that whoever held it was going to get something wrong. So they built the correction into the product and shipped it that way.

Failure was in the design.

Proverbs twenty-four. A righteous man falls seven times, and rises again. Not a righteous man does not fall. Seven times.

Anderson used Peter, and Peter is the right one. Loud, impulsive, publicly wrong on a regular basis, and then the catastrophic failure — three denials in a courtyard on the night it counted most. And the resurrection account does not have Jesus demoting him. Weeks later that same man stands up at Pentecost and preaches, and three thousand people come in.

The distance between the worst thing Peter did and the most useful thing Peter did is about seven weeks.

If you are still living inside a sentence you misspelled years ago, hear this clearly. The eraser is not a reward you earn after enough penance. It came in the box. It was there the whole time you were punishing yourself for needing it.

And notice what the eraser does not undo. It takes out the draft. It does not take out the work. Steinbeck erased plenty before anything on that page became permanent — the erasing is how the indelible part got there.

That is verse three.

BEAT SIX

Lesson Five — It Gets Shorter Every Time It Writes

This is the one I keep coming back to.

The more a pencil writes, the shorter it gets. Every sentence costs it something. There is no way to leave a mark and keep all of yourself.

But watch what actually happens on a desk. A pencil that has been used does not get thrown in a drawer. It goes back to the sharpener. It comes out shorter than it went in and sharper than it has ever been, and then it writes again. And when it dulls, it goes back again. The shortening is not a countdown to nothing. It is a cycle the thing was built to survive, over and over, for as long as there is anything left to say.

That is the part I want you to hear if you are tired. Sharpening is not the end of your usefulness. It is the maintenance of it.

A brand-new pencil — never sharpened, full length, perfect — has done nothing at all.

First Corinthians fifteen, fifty-eight. Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain. Always abounding. That verb is present and it does not stop.

Anderson closed with Paul, and Paul is the clearest picture we have of a life spent all the way down. Beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned. But look at what he does after each one rather than at the end of the story. Stoned at Lystra and left for dead, and he gets up and walks back into the city. Shipwrecked on Malta, and the first thing he does on the beach is gather wood for a fire. Every one of those was a trip to the sharpener, and every time, he came back to the page.

Here is why this matters clinically, because it is a health point as much as a spiritual one.

Being poured out and being burned out are not the same thing, and people confuse them constantly. Burnout is depletion without meaning — effort going into something that is not yours, for a return you never see. Being spent is depletion with a mark on the other side of it. The fatigue can feel identical. The physiology is not identical, and the recovery is not identical. One of them refills when you rest. The other one does not, because rest was never the missing ingredient.

If you are exhausted, the diagnostic question is not how tired are you. It is: is anything being written?

Spent, but never wasted. That is the bridge.

BEAT SEVEN

The Cities of A’s Turn

Everything to this point belongs to the sermon. This next part is mine.

I have spent fifteen years building something called the Citizen Report Card. Fifteen categories, and you grade yourself in each one, honestly, on the areas of life that actually determine how well you live — your body, your household, your money, your preparation, your service, your development, your connection to the people you love.

I do not have all A’s. My grade point average is a 3.4. I will tell anybody that, because the grade was never the point. The point is that most people have never once seen their whole life laid out on a single page where every part of it is visible at the same time.

And a report card is not a verdict. It is a thing you take again. Same as the sharpener.

Here is what the pencil has to do with it.

A mark you leave on a building comes down eventually. A mark you leave on a person does not.

When one household moves one category from a C to an A — when the meals become consistent, when the home becomes safe, when the emergency plan actually exists — the children in that house grow up inside the A. They will not remember the decision. They will inherit the result, and they will hand it forward without knowing they were handed anything.

That is an indelible mark. And it was made by an unassuming person with no platform and no title, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a kitchen.

That is what Cities of A’s is. Enough ordinary people making enough permanent marks that a neighborhood changes and nobody can point to who did it.

BEAT EIGHT

The Ask

Three things, in order.

Listen to the song. Not once — put it in the rotation of an ordinary day and let the chorus do what repetition does.

Then take the Citizen Report Card. It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and you will know something about your life at the end of it that you do not know right now. Grade yourself honestly. A 3.4 that is true is worth more than a 4.0 you had to lie for.

Then pick one category. Not five. One. Move it one letter grade and see who else in your house moves with you.

You were not built to stay in the box, and you were not built to stay full length.

Go leave your marks.

The Be Team | Cities of A’s | James E. Blessman Jr., M.D., M.P.H. | © 2011–2026