Knots

Yesterday in our Bible class at church, a discussion around the word discipline came up, how God disciplines the ones that he loves. What does that mean anyways? We often view things going wrong as if it was God disciplining us for something that we did wrong. We often view the word discipline as punishment, when really it's meant to be more like a practice, or training, like the discipline of running every day to train for a marathon. You could say that not having the stamina to run a marathon is a punishment but that doesn't make sense. You are just born into this world that way, and you need to train to be able to run a marathon. Maybe it would be better said to say that God aligns training for the ones he loves so that they can run through the races that matter.

As the class was discussing this, my meandering mind shifted to the bow and arrow. It often does that for no apparent reason. Bows, arrows, canoes, hunting and fishing, all of those things that seem so relatable. I mean, or at least I think, man, if everyone would pick up a bow and study it for a bit, it would have so many answers.

I looked around the class. The lovers of the bow seemed to be very few. Since they were a captive audience and I didn't think it would be fair to bore them with my thoughts, l kept quiet. On top of that, my verbal explanation would have probably been about as clear as mud. And so I just chewed on the side of my cheek. 

As I was thinking about what to write this morning, I thought, why not put my thoughts on here. Whoever is interested can keep reading and the rest of you can just cruise on out with the touch of a finger.

So, back to my thoughts on discipline and training. How does God train or prepare us for life? My mind jumped to the verse that says, "train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." It often gets used in the form of, "ok let's correct everything that the child does wrong and they'll turn ok  and live the rest of their lives on the straight and narrow."  And when they don't keep walking the walk, we assume we just did a bad job of raising our kids and so we throw up our hands and say, oh well, we tried the best that we could.

And then we often see God as doing that to us.  You know the feeling of I'm not what I could be, so God sent this sickness to me to straighten me out, or any other myriad of things that get thrown our way. Next we start to think all of our misery is our own fault. Then we start to feel worthless. 

Well I don't see it that way. I don't see these things as discipline or training. And I don't think that they come from God. But God can and will use you with these lumps and bumps. You just need to be flexible and let him stretch you into shape so that you can run the race. Back to the bow. I wrote a blog a while back about the primitive longbow. This was the bow that the natives in our area used. For the most part, it was just carved and shaved from a small tree. And it would shoot straight. Now let's imagine ourselves as being that tree, and God being the master bowyer, the one who can make about any old stick into a straight shooter. We start to grow and we just look wonderful. A perfect little tree. But that winter a branch breaks off. The next year it heals over but it leaves a little knot. We keep growing and getting knocked about. And some years the scars are bigger than others and some years there are no scars. And as a tree, we grow up looking pretty straight but inside we have a lot of knots, little things that just happen to us in this world. And some of our knots actually show up on the outside. 

You know what they are. You've been there. Those things that you just can't forget about. And they actually make us grow a little crooked.

So the bowyer comes along, takes the tree, cuts off the knots and anything crooked, and makes a perfectly straight bow, and of course it shoots perfectly. Well it doesn't work that way. If the bowyer would actually do that and put a string on the bow and pull it back, it would most likely break right where our knots are. Ouch!

What the bowyer actually does is a really slow process. He'll start by shaving wood off of the belly of the bow. All the while he'll be bending the bow, watching for weak spots, thinning the thick spots, and often following the grain right around the knot, leaving the knot in place. Sometimes he'll reinforce a knot with sinew. All the while he keeps pulling the bow a little more each time while watching it bend, tillering both ends so they bend the same, shaving one side more than the other so the limbs don't twist, and all the while, "training" the bow in the way that it should go. This all takes time. And if pulled back too far too soon the bow would crack. Eventually the bow draws perfectly. And when an arrow is cast, the string flows perfectly and the shock is absorbed evenly throughout the bow, keeping the weak spots from breaking.

And that's what I think that the discipline or training that we receive looks like for us. It's a slow process. Most of the knots aren't going to be removed, they'll be used. And as the bowyer keeps shaving and training our tough spots, eventually the bend will flow, and the arrow will fly straight, and the proof will be in the pudding.

Over the years I've seen some of these gnarly bows being shot in both real life and in videos. It's amazing how straight some of those crooked bows shoot. Of course they need to be in the hands of a good shooter.

Back to you and I. 

 I believe no matter how gnarled we are, we can still shoot straight. In the hands of a good bowyer, we can be shaped to do what we were meant to do.

 And the training. Well, the knots might hurt. But they're not the training. Learning to use and get around them is.