Shaping

For the last five years I've been working with Young Life, a full time ministry to high school students. Building relationships with kids half my age and telling them about Jesus is often daunting, always challenging and sometimes down right overwhelming.   Every so often, however, I get to do something I really love and call it "work."  One of those things is shaping surfboards.  Three years ago I started shaping boards with four high school boys after their freshman year.  One of those boards sat half way finished in my office for the last two school years, yellowing with age and awaiting its final glory.  Across the deck was scrawled, "Anthony <3's Harrison," (one of Harrison's many jokes attempted on his friends during the shaping process.)  The punch line of that joke wasn't seen by Anthony until a month ago when he came over again, shaved off the yellow foam, and started setting the board back into shape.  That day, stepping back into the shaping room with Anthony, brought all the love of shaping boards back to him and me. Within five minutes I was serving up soda's (which I always had on hand back in the old shaping days) shaving into the foam and admiring the progress we had made.  Standing back, lifting the tip of the board an arms length away, and analyzing the steps that still lay ahead in the process.

Shaping a board, like so many things, is just that: a process.  Its a funny thing too, because some steps of that process are painstakingly long, tedious, and frustrating while others seem like you can wave your magic sandpaper over the blanks exposed foam and a board appears out of what was just a chunky white mass.  Each step, though, is important.  You must do things in the right order or the board will push water, or not turn, or just be down-right ugly.  So you end up doing the difficult things, you shave the wooden stringer running down the middle of the board so it rounds off in the nose and tail.   You count your passes with the sanding block or planer as you smooth out your deck.  You carefully pull your sanding screen around the sides of the blank to expose the correctly shaped rail.   Each step is important, some as unsatisfying as the most nagging chore, but essential to the task.  Along the way, however, there are these wonderful moments when things come together and you get a clear picture of what the finished board could look like and how far you've come and it re-energizes you for the work ahead.   Anthony was at just about to get to one of those moment on the day we picked up our sure-form planers and got to work on his post-freshman-year project.  He left off closer to finishing than we thought he had and only a few steps remained.  Within an hour, we were looking at something radically different.  Out of that yellowed chunky piece of joke-carrying foam emerged something that looked very much like a surfboard, well shaped and nearly finished. We admired it, patted each other on the back, and then started into the fine tuning.  Filing down the nose and cutting the swallow tail into the stringer and the meticulous and slow work began again.

It occurred to me on that afternoon that the process of shaping a surfboard parallels my life on so many levels.   I am a man of slow progress, often times frustratingly slow.  It took me four years to propose to my wife, it takes me a long time to fully trust someone, I waiver back and forth on issues of theology, and it takes me forever to form opinions.  Whether fast or slow, the process of life happens to all of us.  However, rarely in this life are these processes a set proceedure following an ascending line with a fixed slope towards completion.  Its more of a meandering journey filled with times when you're not sure if you're getting anywhere.  Life, like shaping a surfboard, can feel like you're pulling the sandpaper along the same pesky problem over and over again without any progress.  You work, you examine, analyze, talk through the next step, go at it again, pull back and look and nothing seems to change.  Then one day you step back and the thing you've been working on has taken shape into something good, useful, maybe even beautiful.

Faith, for me, is like this.  I sit mulling over the same issue for weeks, months, maybe even years and then I pick up a book, have a new thought as I read the Bible, or have a great conversation with a friend and I finally see in perfect clarity what I had been searching to see the whole time.  It comes clear.   The finished product, or thought in this case, comes into full view.  I often think that if I had just read that book, received that insight, or had that conversation a month or a year earlier it would have saved me a whole bunch of trouble and I could be much farther along with my life.  The fact is that each of those steps put me in the exact place I needed to be to hear what I needed to hear, or read what I needed to read, so that in that moment, I see with great clarity, fullness and satisfaction what I had been seeking:  its goodness, usefulness, and often its beauty.  Then back to the process I go.

God in his mysteriousness seems to work this way more often than I would like him to.  More and more, however, I’m beginning to see that this is his plan in the first place.  Salvation is not just one moment in time.  We are continually being saved: shaped into the people God created us to be. Along the way we have moments of seeing the shaping he is doing in our lives to bring out the goodness, uniqueness, purpose, and beauty he created in us.  God invites us into that work, to know who we really are in him, to believe it, to find hope in it, and to start the process of letting him change us into the person he designed us to be: people uniquely bearing his image as he displays himself to the world through us.  That too is a process but one that brings excitement and life starting right now and joyful expectancy as we await our final glory in the future. 

Space

This year I've taken on the difficult task of coaching a bunch of freshman and sophomore boys to play the game of soccer.  The challenge wont be getting a rag-tag group of squirrely teenagers to try to kick a ball correctly, the challenge I have found is in making sure my own knowledge exceeds theirs so I can further these young men's abilities and cohesively guide them into a functioning team.  Soccer is a beautiful game, and like most things beautiful there is a simplicity among its complexities.  As I've been reading and preparing for the season I've been impressed that the game simplified is one dependent on space.  Without space there is no attack, no motion, no connection.  But when space is found, and the ball and players move through it, there is flow, and combinations, and ultimately the team functions, and the game is played, as it should be.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about coaching the concept of space but I also have been thinking about space in my life because as I've grown older, I've found that there is a deep need in me for space.  I'm fortunate enough to live by the Pacific and on the right day with an uncrowded swell and a log of a longboard under me I get lost staring at the endless gray blue waiting for the next set of waves.  Its hypnotizing to sit there ignoring the rest of the world and take in the expansive water. Its no wonder people gravitate toward the edges of our continents so they can perch, just like I do, beside a space bigger than they can take in at once.

Recently I tied up my hiking boots, borrowed a backpack and hiked into the national forest behind my town with a few friends.  Our first miles of the journey were lit by headlamps under a moonless sky.  That night as I woke up from the hard ground I stared at the star speckled ceiling above me, and as the sun came up revealing the world I had wandered into I saw how alone and open of a place we were in.  Sun scorched grass, almost white from the dry heat, spread across the long open meadows while cottonwoods drew their last drinks from the trickle left in the streams.  As we walked further and further in, we mounted ridges and descended into valleys over and over without anyone or anything in sight.

This space is refreshing, a bit unsettling, but lends me a quick shot of perspective.  When I sit staring at the unchanging Pacific horizon or am lost among the dry fields and parched stream beds of an autumn California wilderness, I find, quite quickly, that I'm not as big as I feel sitting in front of my email, and rolling around in my office desk chair at work. Or as significant as I feel trying to balance my schedule or find time with friends.  Simply put, its humbling.  I realize that I'm not as important as I think I am. At the same time it stirs in me gratitude for that very realization and lets me relax and enjoy the space I have been allowed to discover.

I believe we're built that way.  Like a soccer team, when we find space, in whatever form that fits us, the rhythm and flow of out lives becomes more as it should be.  We remember who we really are and we encounter a bit more of the one who is much bigger than any backcountry wilderness or ocean.  This space reflects God who put it in place.  In the same way I am drawn to something bigger than me in nature I think we are made to be drawn to something bigger than us in him.  We will never understand God but we are made to know him and to realize we are much smaller and he is much bigger, loving and powerful than anything we hold up as overwhelming in our lives.  In that fact we can relax, enjoy and wonder about someone who, though a bit unsettling to our perspective, reminds us there is someone holding all of this life together.  And as we explore that space he shows us a bit more of himself in the process.