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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2008 Donald E. Lindman
620 words

CARVING WOOD AND CARVING A LIFE

By: Don Lindman

One of the perks of retirement is the opportunity to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do but had neither time nor opportunity.  For me, this has meant the opportunity to learn woodcarving.

Two of the men in the retirement community where I live are very experienced and very good carvers, and they’ve taken on seven or eight of us novices and given us both encouragement and instruction.  Most of us carve Scandinavian peasant figures or animals.

It’s been a lot of fun, and as I contemplated having the stitches removed from one of my fingers I thought about the ways in which carving parallels life and about some of the lessons carving has taught me.

Most prominent right now is the renewed awareness that one shouldn’t get careless around sharp knives.  I did get careless and almost sliced the top layer off of my left middle finger.

We wear gloves that give us protection, but they also can make us feel invincible.  Really experienced carvers don’t wear gloves, so I’ve been practicing carving without gloves in the hope that I might be able to consider myself an experienced carver. 

Working on a piece of what I call “petrified basswood” (because it is so hard) I decided to wear the glove for safety sake, but safety has no sake if all the glove does is make you feel invincible.  I did that and wasted a perfectly good carving afternoon in the emergency room of the local hospital.

There are a lot of other things in life that can hurt us if we aren’t careful, and we often take them for granted, whether handling hot stuff around a stove or juggling a coffee cup, hamburger, and cell phone while driving 65 miles an hour on the interstate.  Life is filled with that kind of thing.

I’ve also learned that while frequently you can’t correct your mistakes in carving, it usually is possible to incorporate your mistakes into a somewhat different figure.  Because of a bad knife stroke you may not be able to carve the exact figure you had in mind when you started, but often there are ways to alter that figure and still get a good carving.

Sometimes you end up with a better carving than the one you originally envisioned.  You can make a number of mistakes and still get a pretty good dog out of what originally was to have been an elephant.

Life works that way, too.  We make mistakes and realize that there is no way we can go back and make the mistake go away.  The only thing we can do is move on and try to make our lemon into lemonade or grow roses in our manure.

St. Paul writes in Romans 8:28: “In all things God is working for good together with those who love him.”  The idea that God can take even our worst mistakes and make good come of them makes both theological and practical sense.  I’ve seen it happen over and over again.  It has happened a number of times to me.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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