The Deacon Beacon - February 2015

Once upon a time there was an old wood-turner who liked to make beautiful things out of wood. Sometimes things would turn out well, and other times they wouldn’t. That’s not quite true, though, as the parable will tell.

One day, the wood-turner decided to make a shallow bowl out of bloodwood – a lovely, hard red wood from wherever bloodwood comes from. He carefully worked with the wood and let it tell him what shape it needed to be. Slowly, the bowl took shape and the wood-turner was very happy.

But the wood-turner didn’t really understand something very important, and for a while took great pride in saying that the bowl was turning out just the way HE wanted it to. Of course, that’s simply not the way life unfolds.

One day, the wood-turner was working on the bottom of the bowl, trying to remove the screw holes that had held the bowl to the chuck. The screw holes were quite deep, and the wood-turner began to wonder when he’d be getting to the bottom of the deepest one. More and more material came off, until suddenly, the whole bottom of the bowl flew off the lathe!

In that moment, the wood-turner knew the piece was ruined. You can’t put a bottom back on a bowl!

Sadly, the wood-turner removed the bowl from the lathe and admired it’s now lost beauty. It would have been a very beautiful bowl, he thought, had it turned out the way HE wanted it. Now it was just an expensive mistake, to be taken to the woodpile and burned.

On the way upstairs to the fireplace, the bowl winked at the wood-turner, the way bowls do sometimes, and the wood-turner stopped dead in his tracks. Of course the bowl hadn’t turned out the way HE had wanted it. The bowl had turned out the way something much larger in life needed it to be, and had come to be what it had really been destined to be all along.

With a humble laugh, the wood-turner realized his real mistake and carefully finished off the bowl so that its true inner beauty and real purpose shone forth. The beautiful bowl is now a beautiful puzzle-holder (see picture 3)!!

Hardly a mistake, wouldn’t you agree?

Which leads us to the Parable of the Puzzle of course, but that will have to wait for another time….