It’s been a very long time since I’ve written for this blog, and there’s a few good reasons: for one, I felt awkward “chronicling” the story of my stupidity and my flight away from God. I understand that it is not primarily the story of a stupid young man, but the story of a great and gracious God pursuing and rescuing a stupid young man; if my shame brings glory to the name of Christ and hope to other stupid young men, then, as David said, “I will make myself yet more contemptible than this!” The second reason for the long silence is the beautiful distraction of thrilled and terrified preparations to welcome my daughter, my first child, into the world. In retrospect, the things we’ve been busy doing in readying our family for its third member haven’t really taken up that much time over seven and a half months; but like streaks of sunlight bursting through clouds, the anticipation has outshone most other thoughts and happily burned my eyes so that whatever else I look at, I see flashes and outlines of my impending fatherhood…and it makes me smile. The third reason is directly related to the second: since Patty and I are about to embark on the most beautiful, difficult, and ambitious journey we’ve ever known, I decided to embark on a smaller one, made of wood - I’ve been building a changing table for Kensli Raye Kuriyama.
Deciding what to build first for Kensli was pretty easy: she’s not going to be able to play with a rocking horse until she’s older, giving me time to build one. She’s not going to have mountains of toys for a little while, so I’ve got time to build a toy chest. She’s not going to be Houdini, so I didn’t want to “practice” my novice furniture-making skills on someone so fragile by building a crib/death trap. So my wife, ever the defender of children, lovingly suggested I build something that could not endanger our daughter: “How about a changing table?” Brilliant! There’s only three things I have to accomplish with a changing table:
1. Hold up an eight-pound baby
2. Don’t give her tetanus
3. Make it semi-attractive enough that I don’t immediately depreciate the value of our home.
I psyched myself up, confident that I could meet the standards; if not, then two out of three ain’t bad! We thought that, hopefully, our children won’t be in diapers forever, so we wondered what we could do with the changing table then? Patty didn’t find it very funny that by the time our children will be done with the changing table, I’ll probably be back in diapers and will need the table myself. So we compromised on a changing table/dresser; I drew up a simple plan, drew out measurements, and started shopping for wood. For this I decided to use aspen, with which I’ve never worked or really even seen in lumber form. I’ve only seen either the trees or aspen wood shavings, but I found edge-glued panels at Lowe’s that I thought would make it interesting. As you can see from this picture of an aspen sauna room that I robbed from the internet, aspen is a pretty soft white wood that kind of handles like pine, but has far fewer knots and a much more even grain. In fact, I thought at the onset that this aspen was pretty plain.
However, after I had prepped some tester pieces of the aspen and started to apply some stain (Patty wanted something darker to go with the rest of the nursery furniture) I was blown away by what the stain unlocked! Here is a picture of the bottom of the top of the table after I stained it the first time after I routed the channels (I believe they’re called “dadoes”) for the sides, back, and center panels.
You can see how the grain really popped! I had no idea how much figure was in this wood, how much character and shape and rhythm it had, just waiting for something to reveal it! Yup, I feel some analogies coming on!
I’ve been called many things: an idiot, a genius, the world’s most handsome man, “that guy from Ace of Cakes,” etc. One thing I’ve never been accused of is patience, stick-to-it-iveness, or having attention to detail (or a healthy BMI, for that matter). That’s why I find it so odd that I enjoy woodworking so much: you have room to slip up a little in carpentry, politics, and neurosurgery – but not in woodworking. And there is no task in woodworking more painstaking and monotonous than sanding. Through hours of hand-numbing work, your task is to remove every blemish on the surface of the wood, to lay low what is high and bring high what is low, to transform splinter into splendor. It is sweat and strain applied to what the wood is for the sake of what the wood can become. It takes something of a dreamer to be a woodworker – someone who, for the sake of what will be, begins and endures through what is. Immediately, my thoughts turn to our sanctification, of our transformation “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18), how Paul implores us to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13). There are two agents in our transformation: God, through His Spirit, and us, as we work with the Spirit step-by-step toward Christ. For instance, a good farmer can labor long and hard each day, but he knows that he is dependent on God to make the clouds rain, the sun shine, and the seed grow. A good farmer prays for rain and sunshine, but he also gets up every day and hoes weeds. This is our partnership.
But there is another partnership that has also become beautiful to me while I’ve been working on this table: cultivation. In Genesis 1, as God is finishing His last day of creating all things, He makes Adam and Eve and gives them this charge: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (v. 28). God sets mankind in the middle of a garden, which is in the middle of chaos. What’s the difference between a garden and wilderness? Cultivation. Cultivation is man making good things out of what God made and called “good.” Creation + Dominion = Cultivation. The Bible begins with a garden filled with God’s presence and ends with a city filled with God’s presence; so how do you get from a garden to a city? Cultivation. Agriculture, industry, commerce, art: these are not inventions of man but outflowings of the imago Dei, the image of God in which we are made (“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness. And let them have dominion” (Genesis 1:26). These sections in Genesis are what theologians call the “Cultural Mandate,” the first command from God in which He said to us (paraphrased, of course), “I’ve made a big world and made it good, and in the middle of it I’ve cultivated a garden. Go and do likewise with the rest of the world. And have babies, because you’re going to need the help.” And this isn’t the only time that this topic comes up in Scripture: David glorified God for the tasks He’s given us in Psalm 8 (“Yet You have made him [man] a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet” [vs.5-6]). In the New Testament, Paul speaks several times about how and why we work, like in Colossians 3:23 (“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men”) and 2 Thessalonians 3:12 (“Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.”). Psalms and Proverbs are replete with references to hard work and bearing fruit and earning a wage and a living, along with a plethora of praises to God for the works of His hands. This is God’s likeness and image in us, that we also enjoy creating, building, designing, crafting, improving, beautifying. This is a good and gracious thing when done in the glory and delight of the Father!
And this is why I love sanding and staining: in this process, I see the work of God’s hand in the wood and the work of my hands in the preparation, and see them explode in beauty, a dance between Creator and creation – God inviting me to work and play.
