My good friend Wes came up to stay with us this weekend. We had a great time going to the Foxfire Museum in Mountain City yesterday, since he and I are both nerds about old tools and technology. Wes got me this old tool for a present:
In case you’re interested, it’s a block plane, used for smoothing end grain wood. It’s about 80 years old, but still in great condition and totally serviceable. The only thing that needed fixing was the blade, which needed about 20 years’ worth of sharpening. The important thing is to carefully scrape away the rust and hone the blade on a coarse stone one stroke at a time (yep, this is about as time-intensive and boring as it sounds). But if you do it wrong or too quickly you can permanently ruin the blade!
Wes showed me the right way to do it and I took over, but my patience wore thin and I was tempted to just grind it down with the Dremel in place of the whetstone (which I would have done if I were alone, and which of course would have ruined the project). But the presence of someone who knew how to do what I was attempting, and who’d been there before, was enough to encourage me to see the task through to the end, necessary though toilsome as it was.
I think this is a big part of the reason God gives us Christian fellow-travelers to walk with. Just being with someone who’s experienced the same struggles and triumphs as oneself can be incredibly encouraging, especially since it’s so tempting to cut corners to get to the fun part. He sends us out as a band of laborers in the vineyard, or two by two down the road, not as individuals prone to wander and vulnerable to attack. Although there are patterns and the same course objectives, God teaches each of us on an individualized curriculum. A high school student at church might have dealt with something a dozen times by the time I encounter it for the first time! And my perspective on a Bible passage could be (usually is) totally different from my wife’s insight. I hope I’m never too proud to learn godliness from anybody. Praise God for friends. Praise God for company.
