Tools

October 20, 2018

Tools. One of the benefits of living as long as I have is that I’ve collected some pretty useful tools over the years. That might not seem very important to some people, but I can say with absolute certainty that without the right tool, some jobs are much more difficult, and others are impossible. Turns out, I have quite an assortment. Thirty years ago, our next door neighbor died. Art had been the front end man at the Chevy garage in town, and left quite a collection of tools behind. In the summertime, he would sit on his front porch and wave at all the cars passing by. Our dog Fritz would keep him company. One day the dog catcher told Art he needed to get his dog’s license renewed. “That’s not my dog!” Art told him. Of course, for all intents and purposes he was. About the only thing Fritz didn’t do at Art’s was sleep. At night. He did a lot of sleeping there during the day. 

When Art took sick toward the end of his life, I visited him in the hospital and talked with him about the Lord. Linda and I often sat and talked with him on his front porch, and had witnessed often to him. But it was in those final days that Art came to know Christ as his Savior. His son is married to a second or third cousin of Linda’s so we’ve known them for years. I offered to organize Art’s tools for the yard sale his son planned. There were some that I wanted to buy, so I started setting them aside till I reached the dollar limit I had set for myself. His son was so thankful that his dad had come to Christ that he gave me the tools I had set aside. I still have them today, even though most everything is now metric, and cars are so complex about all I can do is change the oil and brakes. But when you need a wrench, a pair of pliers just doesn’t cut it.

I have garden tools and carpentry tools, and it’s the latter I’ve been using lately. The chop saw I bought from my sister, the table saw Linda bought me for Christmas a couple years ago, a sawzall for the hard-to-get places, hammers, drills and drivers, screws and nails. Today I put what I hope is the last coat of spackling on the walls of our son’s bathroom. I used a three inch blade to dig the compound out of the bucket, a slotted spreader as a hod, a six inch blade to spread the mud evenly on the wall, and a corner tool for...the corners, of course! 

Without the right tools, none of this would have been possible. I am thankful for inventors, manufacturers, and suppliers for all the tools and equipment that make it possible for me to remodel a bathroom. I pity those who live in apartments where someone is hired to do all the maintenance work. They are missing out on the satisfaction of DIY.

I am thankful also that not only do I have tools, but I can be a tool, a useful instrument in God’s hands. Ephesians 4 says that God gave gifts to the church; then Paul lists a few of them. They aren’t inanimate objects, but people, tools God uses to build people up in faith. 

When my boys were small, they once used a good wood chisel to open a can of paint. When I needed it, the edge looked like a saw with missing teeth. A tool needs to be used properly to avoid hurting the tool, the project, or the user. In the right hands and for the right purposes, the tool does the job for which it was designed. Misuse it, and trouble awaits. My prayer is to be the right tool for the job God has for me, so he can take as much pleasure in this tool as I do in mine.