Tools

Life is all about the right tool for the job.

Growing up in a family of contractors taught me about which tool is proper for a particular job, and how important it is to choose wisely. For instance, one would not want to try to split wood with an iron wedge and a ball-peen hammer because it would take a whole day's worth of pounding to break a log if if worked at all; but using a nice solid sledge hammer, an experienced splitter can bust a chunk of hickory with one blow. In the same way, a framing hammer would pulverize bricks and cinder blocks, but a tap with a masonry hammer can make a perfect break so that the stone or brick is custom made for it's spot in the wall. Choosing the wrong tool has consequences: an English wrench will round the edges of a Metric bolt every single time; pliers do not hold as tight as vice grips, and if the nut is too wide you will need channel locks to hold onto it anyway; screws that are not self-tapping take twice as much time and work because they need a guide hole drilled first; and everything on God's green earth works better with a good coating of WD-40.

I have a toolbox in my car most of the time so I can be ready to fix what needs fixing; this is mostly due to my philosophy that "a tool in the hand is worth 3,000 in the basement"-- (my dad has been in the business for a while so we have a screwdriver or two at my house, but it always seems that what any of us actually needs is never easily found). Knowing about tools has also influenced my attitude toward all kinds of broken things. When I find that a thing simply will not do what it was made for anymore, it isn't necessarily time to whip out the MasterCard for a new one. That is, I learned early in life what it is for something broken and useless to be redeemed.

My family had an old Chevy pick-up truck for years-- it would break down sometimes, then we would need it for one rough-and-tumble job or another, and we would fix it. When it was fixed, it was redeemed-- it had worth for its original purpose as a vehicle again, and it ceased in its lesser value as an eclectic yard ornament that made mowing seem like an obstacle course. Our adventures using tools to fix that '76 Scottsdale (affectionately referred to as 'the truck of many colors') have helped me learn how broken humanity has been redeemed by Christ.

In Genesis, Adam and Eve's sin carried a penalty of death for the entire human race. Jesus came to humanity both to preach repentance for sin, and to fix the penalty of death: he spent his life living humbly and teaching us how to serve one another, then, while his body lay in the tomb, the everlasting God-part of Jesus used our human nature as a disguise to infiltrate Hell. It was a shabby and powerless place where God's Truth and Life and Light could never be contained, so when Jesus arrived Hell cracked open with an explosive blast to release every righteous soul from death.

Had Jesus Christ been only a good man and not the Word of God, he could have taught us how to repent and how to temporarily put everything to rights, but our nature still would have been vulnerable to death. Had God given everlasting life to us again without walking in a human body, there would be no example of repentance and humility we could follow and relate to, and it wouldn't take long for us to turn again to the sin that damned us in the first place. Humanity needed precisely the Word made flesh-- the one and same Word of God who breathed life into the first human in creation is the only one who, through the cross, could re-create humanity into a people whose very essence and nature is new life.

For Jesus to have been half God and half man, or for the Word to be a creature created by God instead of a part of God's own essence, or for God to lack a human will of his own, would be almost the right tool to save humanity from sin and death-- like using a ball-peen hammer with an iron wedge to try to split a log. None other than the Word of God made flesh, fully God and fully human, could save us entirely. Life is all about the right tool for the job.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; with him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it...He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-- children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." -The Gospel of John 1:1-4, 10-14

Tattoos 2

My cousin's husband is a Christian who has a tattoo-- his is a big Georgia State Bulldogs emblem, and it's right smack on his buttcheek. If you ask him, he'll show it to you. His is one of my favorites because of his motive in getting it. Drunken indiscretion? Nope. He did it because it's funny.

He says it's a punchline that just keeps delivering. "The first time your wife sees it in all it's glory-- it's funny," he says. "When you're getting your appendix taken out and you take a stroll down the hospital corridor with the gown untied...it's funny." Every time someone sees it while giving him a sponge bath at the nursing home fifty years from now, it's going to be funny.

When life gets tough for him I bet he can just think about what's behind him and get a good kick out of it. I have always thought that about our hind quarters in general; maybe God put them on us so we could laugh about the ridiculous piece of anatomy that follows us around everywhere we go. I laugh about it on a regular basis and I think God does too because if God can see our hearts, God can definitely see through our fruit-of-the-looms. Whether or not God laughs at all our hineys as I presume, God is definitely in on a very funny Georgia joke.

Tattoos 1

27 August 2010

I got off the transit bus this morning behind a guy who had a huge United Methodist Church emblem tattooed on his left calf. He's branded forever: Methodist Guy. He won't ever have to explain himself or his beliefs until he's on vacation with his grand kids and they want to know what that reddish squiggle beside the blackish-bluish lines used to be. He will explain to them that he was real cool in college so he expressed his love for Jesus and Methodism in permanent body art. But the UMC logo will have evolved by then, and his grand kids will probably think he was into burning crosses in people's yards during the human rights movement because kids have no sense of time and they just lump all of the history they know into one big day where there were a bunch of wars and light bulbs were invented. It's okay, kids, grandpa is a good person, he was just real cool in college.

Tattoos Introduction

I don't have any tattoos, but I like people who have them. I especially love Christians who have tattoos because it seems to me that a story which warrants commemoration in ink is almost always a great story; as such, I've decided to discuss a few of them with you.