The Three-Legged Stool inEli's Workshop

In a small furniture shop outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a Mennonite craftsman named Eli Stoltzfus spent fifty-two years building Windsor chairs. Visitors to his workshop often noticed a battered three-legged stool beside his workbench — the first piece he ever made as an apprentice. Eli would tap each leg when explaining his craft to young woodworkers. "The first leg is study," he would say. "You must learn the grain of the wood, how it bends, where it wants to split." He would tap the second leg. "The next is practice. You cut and shape and ruin good lumber until your hands know what your mind has learned." Then the third. "And finally, you teach someone else. That is when the knowledge becomes yours forever." If even one leg were missing, Eli would remind them, the stool topples.

Ezra understood this long before any woodworker did. The scribe had set his heart — not stumbled into, not casually attempted, but deliberately resolved — to study the Law of the Lord, to practice it in his own life, and then to teach it in Israel. The order was not accidental. Ezra never taught what he had not first lived, and he never lived what he had not first studied. In a season when Israel desperately needed rebuilding, God raised up a man whose integrity rested on all three legs. The people could trust his teaching because his life was the proof.