It’s Just a Shed: A Lesson From My Father

When I was a young boy, I spent part of a summer helping my father build a shed in our backyard. To me, it was a grand project. I imagined it as a little house, and I thought every board had to be square, every nail straight, every line exact. But my father had a way of easing my worries when things didn’t turn out quite right. If a cut was off by an inch or a nail bent halfway in, he would chuckle and say: “Well, it’s just a shed.”

At first, I thought that meant the mistakes didn’t matter because it wasn’t an important building. But as I grew older, I realized that phrase carried a deeper lesson. My father wasn’t telling me that quality didn’t matter. He was reminding me that perspective did. The shed didn’t have to be perfect to serve its purpose. It didn’t have to win awards or impress anyone. It just needed to stand, to hold tools, and to give us the satisfaction of finishing what we started.

What started as his offhand comment turned into a saying I carried with me long after. To me, it meant: don’t sweat the small stuff. Keep the big picture in mind. Don’t let the little imperfections ruin the joy of the work. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to hear in it other familiar truths: keep it in perspective... progress over perfection... pick your battles... the memory matters more than the mistake.

The shed itself became more than just a building. My father worked in it for years afterward. It became the place where he helped me with school projects and science fairs, patiently guiding me as we sawed, hammered, soldered, and experimented together. Later, after I left home, the shed never sat quiet. He filled it with woodworking projects, building toys, furniture, and keepsakes for his children and, eventually, his grandchildren.

In that way, the shed was more than four walls and a roof. It was a workshop of love, a place where lessons were shaped into lasting gifts. Just as the shed itself carried the marks of imperfection, so too did some of those projects, but what endured was the joy they brought and the care that went into every piece.

Like me, my father was also a Scottish Rite Mason, though as a boy I didn’t think much about it. Only later did I realize that many of the quiet lessons he lived out were the same principles he carried from the lodge into daily life. What he shared with me in the backyard was in many ways the same timeless wisdom he had received as a Brother.

This article was published in the December 2025 edition of the Voice of the Orient.