I absolutely hate putting together furniture. I'm pretty awful at it. Ask my wife, she's seen me in action. You know that place on instruction manuals that tell you the approximate assembly time? I've begun to simply add 50% extra time for myself to know how long it's actually going to take.
At our home, Rachel has a room that is dedicated as her photography studio/office. I also have a space of my own. Right now it's the catch-all room of the house, but before that, it was my study. I have a love of books, and coming from 3-too-many years of college, I have plenty of books to love. That also means that I have plenty of books to find shelves for. So in our second year of marriage, we invested in 3 identical bookshelves from Target.
When I set out to put together the first one, I was confronted with something I hadn't ever handled before ... cam bolts and locks, paired with wooden dowels. Now I'm sure you have some experience with these if you've ever put together office furniture. I have come to appreciate them and loathe their design all at the same time. I felt like I was making extremely good time (for me) and was ready to put the backing on the bookshelf, and then I saw it. The framing on the back of the bookshelf was backward, and because of that I couldn't complete it properly. The backing of the shelf was step #26. The framing was step #4. The cam bolts and locks had lied to me, and I didn't notice it until I was almost done.
Hence my hatred of office furniture.
As a perfectionist, I couldn't just Jerry-rig it to work as it was, so I was left with 2 options: Scrap it for firewood or work my way backward and start over. So I began the arduous process of taking it apart, lock by lock ... dowel by dowel. And no, I didn't whistle while I worked. I mostly grumbled incoherently, throwing in a profanity or two ... or twenty. In any case, I wasn't happy. Eventually I got it together properly, and then was careful not to repeat my error in the other bookshelves. They look marvelous.
On May 3rd, I will celebrate my 15th year of being a redeemed man, sold-out for Jesus and serving Him with everything I have. I'm a Life Pacific College Graduate, as well as a Life East alumnus. I've served several pastors in several churches in a variety of ways, but I find myself in an odd place at this major adult benchmark... You see, a little over a year ago, I discovered that in all of my effort and work at being a Christian man, somewhere along the way I skipped a step. I missed a detail. There was no way around it. I could not continue forward to embracing the destiny that the Lord had for me because something was off. Something in my framework was backward, and it couldn't be ignored. And for the last year, I've kicked and grumbled and swore under my breath (and at the top of my lungs), because I was working my backward rather than forward. I was undoing everything just to get back to step #4. It's been a painful process, but one I think was absolutely vital to my future as a man after God's heart.
Today at church, while listening to Pastor Dale speak, something settled in me that hadn't been settled until today: "If I am being undone so that I can be a healthy member of the body of Christ for the next 15 years, it's absolutely worth it." Being disassembled is infinitely better than being discarded and used for firewood. So tonight, after the blog post, dinner and some family time, I think I'm going to go upstairs to those bookshelves, grab two of my first Bibles (A blue pocket sized full Bible and a red leather bound New Spirit Filled Life Bible), and pick back up at step #4.
To Pastor Larry and Pastor Dave "Andre Agassi" Barndt, thank you for giving me those Bibles as a teenager and insisting that I mark them up as much as I wanted to. Without your love, starting over would be much more difficult. And to Pastor Dale Jenkins, thank you for fanning the flame and being like Jesus; "a smoldering wick He will not snuff out, and a bruised reed He will not break."
