Stumped Again

The folks who show up at Out of the Woodwork are a pretty diverse lot, male for the most part. Even back in the days of my public school teaching, most of my students were boys. However there were always a few more adventurist girls who elected to take classes in industrial arts. When that first started happening, it became apparent that the girls were generally better at patience and perseverance, more willing to spend the extra time sanding or fitting to get things just right. Another distinction was the creativity that seemed more likely to be a product of the female mind than was likely with the boys. So, in light of those remembrances, women have never been discouraged from being part of the scene at the workshop.

This past year a woman began coming to Out of the Woodwork and reminded me of those long ago days when the really challenging projects were often undertaken by the girls. Of course today the availability of seeing virtually anything being done on a You tube video makes for some pretty wild, "I think I could do that," opportunities. So it was no big surprise when my new student came to me with the idea of making a table using the stump of a tree as the support pedestal. Thinking I had discouraged the idea when I indicated that we would have to find an appropriate stump, I stopped thinking too seriously about the logistics of making a table out of a stump.

I had underestimated that perseverance factor that I mentioned above. My new student stopped at the staging area that the construction company that is widening a local road was using and asked if she might have one of the hundreds of stumps that were piled up waiting to be ground into mulch. The excavator operator was kind enough to pull the stump of choice off the pile and put it aside. After several hours of pressure washing and chainsaw trimming the stump was ready for sanding and final shaping. One of the more challenging details was hollowing out the stump to reduce the weight to more manageable size. Fortunately my large chainsaw has a bar long enough to go all the way through and although it was a bit of a workout, the stump pedestal is now hollow and about half the weight it was originally.

Projects like this one are always undertaken with an attitude of, "Let's give it a try." knowing that it could be start over time whenever this doing stuff for the first time doesn't work out. So it is with all of our lives. Being comfortable, not trying something new for fear of failure, refusing to move out of comfort zones are all best avoided. We come into this world as part of God's design and moving closer to what he has designed us for is not unlike tackling an unlikely project like making a table pedestal out of an old tree stump. Don't be stumped. Let the best Carpenter shape you into His special design.