Being shaped

I spent several hours yesterday working on the dining room table I'm building for my wife and me. I started out looking at a slab of hard maple measuring about 9' x 3.5' and it was beautiful. It was beautiful because I had made it-- because it was made up of eight pieces of lumber that were beautiful to begin with and that I had cut and shaped, laid out, and glued together so that their beauty would stand out even more and so that they could serve a purpose. I hope my wife and me and our children will eat lifetimes of meals around this table with friends, enemies, strangers, and assorted others. I hope that problems will be solved, jokes will be told, and dreams will be born and grow around this table. I hope this table will become a place of grace and love, of wisdom and justice, of generosity and healing.

I had put a great deal of work into that slab of wood and I was proud. There was a lot more work to do, however. It started with two hours of scraping excess glue off the surface. Then, with the help of some fellow woodworkers we set up a drum sander and ran the top through it a few times to begin smoothing it. That didn’t work so well so I went to work with a hand plane, scraping paper thin shavings of wood away. The planing was tedious and hard, working muscles I don’t use too often. Individual strokes didn’t seem to make much difference other than generating a lot of wood on the floor which I would have to sweep up and place in a bag for recycling.

I spent 4 hours doing that yesterday, and that slab looked worse when I stopped than when I started. As I worked I wonder if God’s shaping of us works the same way. As we lay our lives out before God, does God look at us the same way I looked at the pile of lumber I started with, marveling at the beauty, yet seeing so much more? I believe God does. I believe God looks at each of us with love, and, as we allow, God begins to shape the pieces of our lives, even the messed up and wounded ones like the board which had been discarded by the bullet I found in it. God cuts and trims and smoothes and glues us up, all the while thinking how our life will be places of grace and love, of wisdom and justice, of generosity and healing. God scrapes and sands; whittling away at the rough spots, the high points of pride, the twist of sin, the warp of bitterness and shame born of unconfessed wrongs and unhealed wounds.

I have a lot more work to do on our new table top before it is finished. I will spend hours planing and sanding, cutting and shaping, applying finish and polishing before the first place is set, the first candle is lit, the first meal is served. Even after all this work is done, the finish will need to be renewed; scratches may need to be sanded out; and maybe some leaves will be added. I think our lives are the same. God the Holy Spirit, just keeps working on us through prayer, scripture, Christian fellowship, and, well, life. For me God has been scraping and shaping me through my seminary courses, pastoral ministry, marriage, friendships, illness, strangers, walks, and many other things. Jesus said we’re branches, and branches need pruning to remain fruitful (John 15:1-11). I’m pretty sure the process of God shaping us is slow and hard and sometimes seems to make more of a mess than a difference. In the end, I trust it will all be worth it and it will be beautiful.