Plane Truth

July 26, 2019

The cider press Linda gave me last year for Christmas needs a bit of work. The grinder box was made from plywood which had delaminated at some time, so a couple weeks ago, I took it apart in order to make patterns for a new box made from solid wood. I still have some of the oak table leaves my grandfather bought at an auction for ten cents apiece back in the fifties, so I figured a couple of them would be the cat’s meow for the project. They needed cleaning up first. 

As luck would have it, last week I borrowed a portable planer from a friend for another project, and hadn’t returned it yet. Having a bit of time on my hands this afternoon, I figured it was now or never. I fired up the planer, and started in. 

Softwood like pine is pretty easy, but oak is a different story. Living as we do in a fast food and microwave world where we expect everything to happen almost instantaneously, projects like this snap us back to reality in a hurry. For millennia, people have had to have patience that is hard to come by today. Fields were cultivated by horse-drawn plow and harvested by hand. Books were written laboriously, inked word by word, and meticulously bound by skilled craftsmen. Cathedrals took hundreds of years to erect, stones cut and shaped by mallet and chisel, beautiful stained glass windows leaded together piece by piece. Furniture was crafted one piece at a time and smoothed with broken glass or a piece of shark’s skin. An electric planer would have seemed a gift from heaven.

But even a planer requires a bit of patience. After running a board through, the motor is shut down, the lock is released, and the bed is raised the minutest fraction of an inch before the board is fed through again. With hardwood like oak, the temptation is to raise the bed too much at a time, which stalls the machine, leaving a hump in the board. About a quarter of a turn of the crank each time raises the bed about 1/64”. Sometimes even that small amount is too much. It takes numerous passes, but finally the work is done. Tomorrow I’ll cut the boards to pattern, and shortly thereafter, I can re-assemble the grinder.

I often wish I could see major progress in my life. I’d like to be able to grind off the rough edges wholesale, to shave the imperfections in great chunks, but God’s work in me is usually almost imperceptible. On top of that, it is repetitious. I’d like to think God could take one or two passes and I’d be smooth and clear, without warp or imperfection, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way. He has to run me through his spiritual planer time after time. His divine blades whirr and whine (maybe it’s me doing the whining!), and ever so slightly I begin to conform to his plan. Around my feet lie the shavings of my old self, but his work reveals beauty heretofore hidden beneath layers of dirt and shame. I guess like me with the planer, if he tries to take too much off all at once, everything would stall and shut down. So I take my time, bit by micro bit, and trust that God is doing the same with me, and is just as determined to finish the project as I am. “He who has begun a good work in you will not cease to perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” —Philippians 1:6