School Days

The days of the one room school house was pretty much over by the time I started school. The one room schools were consolidated once it became practical to bus some folks to a central location beyond walking distance for many of the school-age children in the rural areas. The first six years of school found me in the Bushkill Consolidated School. As we talked about the needs of public education in the men's growth group that I lead, we compared the education systems to which we were exposed growing up.

The Bushkill Consolidated School was attended by my father and at that time consisted of grades one through 10. For many folks that was adequate for their ambitions, However, grades eleven and twelve, required catching a ride with the mail bus to East Stroudsburg. By the time I started school, the Bushkill building housed grades one through six. There were two teachers; one for grades one to three and another for grades four to six. As with so many things that happen to us when we are young, I appreciated those teachers and their dedication only long after being in their classrooms.

It was a remarkably good system, assuming the teachers were good disciplinarians, and the ones I had were certainly that. In first grade, we were in the room when lessons were taught to the second and third graders. In essence, by the time we were promoted to fourth grade (the room with the big kids) we had experienced and previewed all three grades three times. Learning to work independently while the other two grades got most of the teacher's attention was an unbelievably valuable lesson in itself. Of course, the process went the same with the next three grades as well. The system also gave the teacher the opportunity to have students participate in lessons above their grade if they seemed ready for that and to require students to sit in on lessons from previous grades if review was in order.

 Those wonderful teachers were responsible for the whole ball of wax. They not only were masterful in the academic subjects, but taught music and art as well. The recess time built into each day even provided physical education. The weather had to be pretty extreme in order for recess time to be held indoors. It all got done without duplicators, calculators, word processors, printers or TV. Even then, the teachers were innovative. When they thought it important that we see the inauguration of our new president, the whole school walked to the closest home that had a TV so we could witness Dwight Eisenhower being sworn in. I thank those teachers, living or not, for working so hard, In the words of Sandy Mccaullif, "They touched the future." 

Stumped

One of the pleasures of the way we work wood at Out of the Woodwork is that we often see the entire process from the time a tree is felled to the finished project. Reminders of from where the lumber comes is out in the woods in the form of the stumps that generally last for a long time. Six years ago, as part of our forest stewardship plan, we did a thinning cutting and sold the timber. I was reminded of that venture as I looked through some photos from back in that time period and was reminded that although we have nothing to compare to the giant trees on the western part of the country, there are some pretty good sized trees around these parts.

The photo in this post is of the stump of one of the trees that was cut in the thinning cutting. It is a Red Oak and if you blow up the picture you can see that it was close to four feet in diameter. There were a lot of trees taken out of the area where this stump is located and the amazing thing is, if you overlook the stumps you would hardly guess that trees had been removed. That's the purpose of a thinning cutting. By removing harvest-able trees, the ones left behind get larger and tend to fill the openings in the canopy left but their relatives who have moved on to be furniture and firewood. There's no good way to know where the lumber that was part of that big Oak ended it's journey. We can only hope that it served a good purpose and the resulting projects and the craftsmanship that went into them are appreciated as true gifts from our Creator.

The stumps are silent reminders of the way of all living things. Eventually they die. Just as we hope that the lumber from a tree is used wisely and for good purpose, so we must take care to see that our lives also used for good purpose. I truly believe that each person is a creation of God and is created with His purpose in mind. However, we have been given free will and therefore, unlike the tree, we get to choose what purpose we pursue. Also, unlike the tree, we have been assured that when we die we have just begun to live eternally if we believe in God's Son and live like Him in God-honoring purpose. We will not leave stumps behind. But then God has something much better in mind.

Embrace Contemplation

Convalescing with a broken ankle or other injury that keeps you from doing the things you normally do causes some forced change in lifestyle. After two and a half months of being away from some common activity like driving yourself and walking any further than necessary for anything, I find myself checking off the things I am doing again "for the first time". As you might suspect, one of the "firsts" I really anticipated was getting back to the wood shop and picking up where projects (my own as well as other's) left off back in November. Although things are back to a pretty normal schedule, the feeling is a little different and perhaps looking at why it's different is worth examining.

Although the wood shop is working along fine, it gives me pause to remember the knowledge that one day will be the last day I spend in that place I love. That is the kind of thought that occurs to one during a time when we are slowed down and given time to think about what it is we truly love and the fact that whatever those things may be, one day they will be no more. This, of course, is true of things more important than wood working. A time of convalescence can be healthy if it allows us to consider just what our priorities are; things like relationships, especially with family and friends and the ways we can best serve in this short temporal life.

At our cores we all want our lives to have made a difference and when one convalesces thoughts of just how our lives may have really mattered. Stephen Covey in his classic best seller "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" listed as "Habit #2 - Begin with the end in mind. He suggested we imagine our own funeral and what we would want those in attendance to say about us. Just what was it about how you lived that left this world a better place than when you arrived. It's fair to say that this can happen only when we put others ahead of ourselves and humbly repent when we find ourselves involved in a bunch of self-serving activity.

I have come to believe that living with the intention of serving others can only be fully accomplished with regular attention to worshiping God. Someone has said that going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. The truth is only in a church can you hope to find the encouragement and accountability to truly follow Christ. This is a kinda funny place to end up a post about wood working. But then a period of convalescing gets you to thinking about what really matters and what it takes to make it happen.