Deacon Paul Nghia Pham

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12

The factory floor had a particular sound when things were working.

Not loud — just steady — a rhythm of gears and belts and moving parts that made the building feel alive, as if the walls themselves were breathing. Workers walked with the quiet confidence of people who understood their machines, and the owner — who had built the place from nothing but risk and hope — felt safe inside that music.

Until one morning, the sound stopped.

Not gradually.

Just… stopped.

The silence that replaced it was not really silence at all. It was full of things — footsteps, radios crackling somewhere in an office, someone clearing their throat — but it felt like the world had forgotten what to do next.

By noon, the numbers had already begun to pile up in his mind — losses so large they didn’t even feel like money anymore. Engineers leaned over panels, manuals lay open across tables, voices rose and fell in frustrated confidence.

“We’ll find it.”

“We’re close.”

“We’re running diagnostics.”

He nodded at each of them, pretending that reassurance was contagious.

By the second day, confidence had turned into fatigue.

By the third, fatigue had turned into fear.

Someone said the name of a man — an old specialist who no longer worked in factories, who charged too much, who didn’t say much, who — rumor insisted — “just knows.”

The owner hesitated.

Pride always speaks first.

But the machines remained still, and pride does not restart a single engine.

So the man was called.

He arrived quietly — no briefcase, no equipment, only a small screwdriver in his coat pocket, as if wisdom traveled lightly.

He didn’t rush toward the problem.

He walked the length of the factory first — slowly — listening, watching, touching one metal surface, then another, the way a physician rests fingers on a wrist to feel a pulse that isn’t there yet but could return.

The owner followed a few steps behind, wanting to ask questions, deciding not to, feeling oddly like a schoolboy in his own building.

Finally the man stopped beside a section of the line no one had suspected — a place that seemed too ordinary to hold catastrophe.

He leaned in.

He closed his eyes.

He listened to a silence no one else could hear.

Then, without ceremony, he took the screwdriver from his pocket, placed it against one small screw…

and turned it.

Just once.

A click — almost nothing — like a whisper deciding to speak.

The machines shuddered.

Then breathed.

Then — as if remembering themselves — began again.

Belts moved.

Gears turned.

Somewhere far down the line, someone laughed — a sound of relief so honest it felt like gratitude.

The owner exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding for three days.

It took the man only a few minutes to write the invoice.

The number startled him.

Ten thousand pounds.

“Ten thousand,” the owner said carefully. “For one screw?”

The man nodded, unoffended.

“I’d like an itemized statement,” the owner added, because dignity occasionally disguises itself as paperwork.

The man smiled the smallest possible smile.

He wrote two lines.

He handed the paper back.

The owner read:

For turning a screw — £1
For knowing which screw to turn — £9,999

He stared at the page longer than necessary.

Something in him wanted to argue — not about the money — but about the meaning of it.

He looked up at the man.

“How did you know?” he finally asked.

The specialist glanced at the machines — now humming like a city at peace — and said, almost gently,

“I’ve spent a lifetime listening.”

He left with the same quietness he had arrived with.

The owner walked the length of the factory floor one more time, not to inspect, not to supervise — just to be near the sound again.

Only now, it sounded different.

Not louder.

More… fragile.

He ran his hand along the railing, feeling the faint vibration of motion returning to a world that had briefly forgotten how to move.

A small screw.

A small turn.

A practiced hand.

He thought of all the places in his life where he had tried to fix everything at once — tightening every bolt, shouting over every silence, insisting that effort must always equal volume.

He thought of arguments that might have changed with one kinder word instead of ten louder ones.

He thought of decisions that had cost years — when what was missing was not strength…

but wisdom.

He paused beside a section of the line — and for a moment, he imagined his own soul as a vast, complicated system of gears and levers and worn places — full of noises no one else could hear.

He wondered how many times his life had stalled — not because it was broken — but because one small place inside it had gone unattended.

He smiled — not at the machines — but at the quiet truth that had just introduced itself:

sometimes the greatest work
is not in doing more…

but in knowing where to touch.

That night, when the factory lights dimmed and the world returned to its ordinary noises, the owner sat alone in his office, listening to the lingering hum of motion breathing beyond the walls.

He closed his eyes.

And somewhere, in a place no invoice could measure,

he felt something inside him…

turn.