OnFire #137 Careful with the Chisel
Hi Folks:
I hope your week is going well. A highlight from the weekend was the performance of our band in church on Sunday. I sing and play guitar. Our son Ian plays drums. Another teen plays acoustic, and we have a bass player. While we’ve played before, this time we reached our “groove.” That was a lot of fun. Way to go, guys!!
I was just talking with my mother in Summerside PEI. If you’ve seen the Canadian news, they had an ice storm overnight and power poles are down everywhere. Mom got her power back this morning, but most of my other relatives remain without power. Its weird when I recognize the places on the national news.
I have a milestone birthday Thursday. There was a time when I thought 40 was sooooo old. However, I feel like God has been winding me up all this time. I’m looking forward to what God in the future.
That’s about all of our news. Blessings for your week.
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Two weeks ago I told you I was building a podium. This week I’m cutting dovetail joints to join the top to the sides. A dovetail joint is a way of joining two pieces of wood. Done well, dovetails are extremely strong and do not need nails, screws, or glue to stay together. If you open a drawer on a piece of good, old furniture, you’ll probably see dovetail joints at the back. The techniques are ancient. In fact, there were boxes found in Egyptian tombs which used dovetail joints. Since they predate Jesus, its safe to say that he probably used them in his carpentry shop, too.
Part of the work of cutting the dovetails is done with chisels and a mallet. It is painstaking, careful work because the chisels are sharp enough to slice paper and there is great potential to badly scar the wood. One wrong move means a lot of work to repair the damage.
It takes a lot of self-control to use a chisel. I can’t rush into the job. I have to place it carefully and then check, and double check before I give it a whack with the mallet. Still gaining my confidence, I’m not always as straight as I should be cutting the lines, but I’m learning how to control the chisel and make it do what I want it to do instead of what I don’t want it to do.
That’s the nature of self-control, the next character trait Peter tells us to add to our faith in 2 Peter 1:5-6. Self-control is controlling my actions, bringing myself under control to do the things I want to do, and not do the things I shouldn’t. Here is where wood working is a lot different from life. Developing self-control to use the chisels is a lot easier than keeping control of my mouth, my temper, or my body.
I feel pretty stupid when I do something I know I shouldn’t. We have an aluminum pot which has a distinct mark across the bottom from where I thumped it hard on the counter one night. The boys were acting up and I was getting frustrated, so I slammed it down to get their attention. Only later did I see that I had hit it hard enough to dent it. Every time I look at that pot, I am reminded that I lost my self-control that night.
Its relatively easy to tell that story since there was no real harm done. I wish I could say that about other times I did not exercise self-control. A lot of the big mistakes I’ve made can be traced to this fundamental issue of self-control.
Here’s something I’ve discovered about traits like self-control. I need more than resolve to make it happen. If it were as simple as telling myself, “I guess I’d better not do that again,” then I’d be perfect now (but then I’d have to work on humility, wouldn’t I?). It sometimes takes hard work and lots of prayer to keep from doing something dumb.
But here’s the thing. Just as I can learn to use a chisel, I can develop my skills of self-control so that my life makes good things and I spend less time fixing the problems I’ve made.
I hope this helps. Be Onfire.
Troy
ON FIRE is a weekly letter of encouragement by Troy Dennis. To be added to or removed from the ON FIRE list contact him at onfire@eastlink.ca . Archives are located at www.onfireletter.com This letter published Jan 29, 2008.