I am not a carpenter. Not by a long stretch. I regret that I didn’t take wood shop in junior high school. Not that it was encouraged for girls to do so. Only the rebels or really cool girls (which I wasn’t) insisted on wood and metal shop. The rest of us dutifully made muffins everyday in home economics. How I wish I had some understanding of building. I love all things wood. I think I mostly love the smell of freshly cut wood.

Ironically my father was an industrial arts professor- he was an educator for shop teachers. While my parents always told me I could do anything I put my mind to, my dad still had some traditional values. Hence the home economics.

This week I decided I wanted to add a small bench to one of my gardens. More of an architectural feature rather than a set down for a spell kind of seat. I challenged myself to use up wood that we had around the house. I gathered my supplies- hand saw, measuring tape, hammer, nails, wood for the legs and the board for the seat. I needed to cut up a long piece of wood into the four legs. I dutifully measured (twice) and started the job. Because I was using a hand saw, it took me a while performing all kinds of gyrations to saw through the wood: I alternated my arms, made preliminary cuts as a groove, bent over the piece close to the ground (thinking gravity would help me?), finally moved the whole operation to a table.

Eventually I had my legs and was ready to nail to the board. I had the whole thing envisioned in my mind. It should go smoothly. Right? Wrong. I started nailing remembering to use the weight of the hammer to drive the nail rather than muscle the motion. However, try as I might, the nail entered the wood slightly off center. By the time I noticed, the nail had entered the board and was exiting in a spot from where I thought it would. It only took a slight angle to have the 1 1/2 inch nail be completely off where it needed to be.

As I was nailing I was thinking about this quarantine. Some habits of mine have drifted from where I intended. For one, I have found some pants not fitting! We do not own a scale in our home. Haven’t for years. I have always gone by the fit of my clothing and how I feel in gauging weight. Not that I have ever really focused on it.

Well. Between my inactivity of my wrist surgeries and the corona virus quarantine, I found a pair of pants that had been loose in the fall be a little tight this spring. Bother! I had veered slightly off course. Nothing major because the weight gain isn’t large but I definitely do not feel good and I know that at my age if I do not keep on top of it, the muffin top will prevail. I just need to get back to exercising.

Isn’t it true of life that we go along not noticing slight changes but soon enough- our pants don’t fit or the nail has protruded off the side rather than straight across. The thing is, we can always regroup, reset, realign.

So too have I wandered from my spiritual practices. I have not been faithful with my daily Bible reading nor with my wanting to be in community. Kind of correlates to the wrist breakage. Silly as it might be, I think I was upset with God over it- stupid to blame God for my accident but sometimes we do not have rational thoughts. So to show Him how I feel, I stopped reading His word regularly and meeting with others. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. The thing that I need, I reject. The apostle Paul talks about it in the book of Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

One of the greatest gifts from God is that we can always return to Him. “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” I need to stop what I am doing and realign myself with God, to readjust my thinking and my direction. I know that once I get back to my daily reading, my other disciplines will fall into place- I will be able to reset my exercise and eating habits.

What about you? How have you fared during this quarantine time? Were you able to practice healthy physical and spiritual habits? What are they? How do they work into your day? Or do you need to commit to returning?

And that bench. I have set it aside until I figure out something different. That is how life is sometimes. Sometimes we “nail it” and sometimes we don’t. We just have to keep working at it.