The residential psychiatric hospital where I completed my clinical internship had a sprawling campus that was dotted throughout with towering pines and majestic oaks.
A powerful storm came through one day and lightning shattered one of those 100-year-old oaks. The tree was cracked open from the blow, the top two-thirds falling to the ground.
Driving to my unit one day (adult long-term) I noted that all that was left of the tree was sawdust from where the stump had stood the day before. The rest of the fallen tree was now gone as well.
About a month later I had to go to the administration building and in the expansive conference room was a new addition. The room was now hugged in tall bookshelves that looked to my eye to be constructed of cherry wood. They lined three of the four walls in the room and were, in a word, magnificent.
I was stunned because bookshelves like these were far beyond the budget of a state-funded psychiatric hospital.
“Wow! Those are beautiful,” I said to the hospital director, who happened to also be in the room.
“Remember that oak the lightning took out?” he answered. “They came from that!”
Here’s the story.
The large maintenance division of our hospital was headed by a master craftsman. He couldn’t bear the thought of that oak being ground down to mulch.
Instead, he dreamed a dream from dead wood.
He took that dead oak and milled the tree into lumber. So it turns out I was wrong about the bookshelves. They weren’t cherry; they were oak. Hand made with love from the mind and skill of a master.
What this says to me…
It doesn’t matter what you have been through. It doesn’t matter how far you have gotten off track. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve had a (hopefully metaphorical) lightning strike in your life.
There is a Master Craftsman just waiting to get His hands on you. And it just so happens that He, too, was a carpenter.
Put yourself in His hands. Trust Him as He uses the saw, the plane, the rasp, the sander in your life.
Yield to Him.
Surrender (which is a practical translation of “be still” in Psalm 46:10, by the way – “Be still and know that I am God”).
Trust the Master Craftsman. He has a plan. He knows already what He intends to fashion you into.
Paul is alluding to this very truth when he calls us, “His workmanship” (Eph 2:10).
It’s funny, isn’t it. As Christians we readily embrace that Christ died for our sins to restore us to the Father.
And yet, somehow, most of us struggle with believing that God is as active and as interested in our lives as this post implies.
I think G K Chesterton has it spot on: All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.[1]
Although it is hard to believe... dare to believe it.
Dare to believe that you mean that much to God. That you matter that much to Him. Dare to believe He is at work in the vicissitudes of your life... in every detail.
Believe it – and then in the spirit of Psalm 46:10, surrender it all to Him. Just, let it go.
And watch what the Master Craftsman creates in you. And what He creates you into.
[1] As stated in his Father Brown short story The Quick One.
Thank you guys for sharing this, I love the story of the Oak tree. And what a great picture of what the Master Craftsman does in each of our lives if we are willing to be shaped and molded by Him.