Instructions

 January 30, 2022

The air was, as they say, “blue.” From my vantage point at the closed door at the top of the stairs, I couldn’t decipher the actual words, but even as a nine-year-old, I could tell it wasn’t good. It was my grandfather, whose patience occasionally wore thin.

Poppa Henthorn was the grandfather who lay dying of cancer some years later when pastor Ellis faithfully visited and witnessed to him. Those terrible days were yet to come. Poppa Henthorn was a stubborn man. We didn’t know much about his growing up except that his home life was of the nature that he joined the Navy as a teenager, just to get away.

He was, for that day, a big man, towering about six foot three, solid, but not heavy. Like so many men of that era, he had smoked for most of his life, resulting in a heart attack when he was in his fifties that ended his work as a milkman in the city of Rochester, NY. The doctor said he could no longer keep going up and down the steps of the delivery truck to deposit the bottles in the little cubby holes that used to be built into the sides of houses back then, the ones with doors on both the outside and inside.

He wasn’t one to just sit around, so he bought a barn from his sister who lived on the Ridge outside of Brockport, tearing it down so he could build a himself new house. I guess he figured if he was going to cash it in, it would be doing something constructive. 

In the basement of his new home was a wood shop, complete with table saw, band saw, joiner, planer, drill press, shaper, and other assorted woodworking tools that he used to cut everything from floor joists to molding. Which brings me to tonight’s tale. 

He had just obtained a new piece of equipment. No, I don’t know which one it was, but it needed to be assembled, and the task wasn’t going too well. Thus the “blue” air, when my dad walked in on him. My father asked if he had read the instructions. “NO I HAVEN’T READ THE (blankety-blank) INSTRUCTIONS! Remember, patience was not one of his virtues.

My father located them, looked them over, and said, “Here’s your problem: you needed to assemble this part first.” 

“THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE MADE IT THAT WAY!” Poppa’s response was as loud and curt (and probably profane) as it was typical. 

Without realizing it, poppa gave me a valuable life lesson. So often in life, we struggle to put it all together, frustrated at the complexity of it all, angry when nothing fits the way it should. The problem isn’t with life; it’s that we haven’t bothered to read the instructions, and when someone points it out, instead of repenting, we respond exactly like my grandfather. “God shouldn’t have done it this way!” 

I shudder to think of all the times I failed to read the Instruction Manual; even more at all the times I read it, but didn’t follow it, and got mad because I couldn’t put life together. The answer is simple: pay attention to my father’s example, pick up the Instruction Manual and follow it. It inevitably leads to Christ, who alone is able to put life together in a way that really works.