My mother in law is here for a visit. (Cue the scary music.) Just kidding. My mother in law is an amazing lady, if for no small reason she gave me my wife. She visits every fall so she was with us last year around this same time. Consequently, she is able to see the ongoing projects and their varying degrees of completion around the perpetual project called my house.
Years ago, I replaced all of the trim in my house. New wood baseboards, molding, door and window trim, etc. I ALMOST have all of it installed and I have ALMOST completed putting the finish on the bare wood. I am a “wood guy”. I love wood. My dad being a furniture builder, I grew up getting jazzed about a really beautiful piece of lumber. (Weird, I know, just stay with me.) So I’m finally getting the finish put on the remainder of the bare wood around the house. As I was inhaling the fumes from the tung oil can and seeing visions, I was freshly struck by what the tung oil was doing to the wood as it was being applied. What was pale and lifeless, once the tung oil hit the wood, became warm and golden and luminescent. Beautiful.
Even more outstanding, once the oil hit the wood, were those distinctions in the wood that became absolutely beautiful in this moment. And with wood, it is most often where there has been some type of trauma to the tree or where there was a limb or an imperfection, that give wood its most distinctive grain patterns. A tree that has been subjected to wind or trauma or damage and sometimes grows in a less than ordinary fashion, produces the most highly prized phenomena in wood known as burl. Complex. Hard. Very difficult to work with and machine. When fashioned and finished, it is the most rare and consequently, the most valuable wood used in the very best of the very best items made from wood.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” The shaking, the imperfections, the wounds and the knots in your life, will become beautiful under His craftsmanship. For them to become so you must be cut, sanded on and allow the oil of the Holy Spirit to completely permeate your life. And those places that once represented damage and imperfection, become a testimony of the most beautiful and redemptive work of His grace.