My last two blogs have asked:  who packs your parachute?  Who builds into your life?

Last week we observed that it’s not if you’re influenced, but how and when.  We also observed the (sometimes desperate) lengths to which people will go to be in a community.  This week, another thought:

2.  Building into people’s lives is hard work.

As tempered metal meets forged iron…as resistance is encountered in a loving community, that’s when people grow.  The Scriptures tell us:

The blacksmith stands at his forge to make a sharp tool, pounding and shaping it with all his might. His work makes him hungry and thirsty, weak and faint.  (Isa. 44:12, NLT)

Since a dull ax requires great strength, sharpen the blade. That’s the value of wisdom; it helps you succeed.  (Eccl. 10:10)

My good friend Lew Lambert is an artist.  He is a master craftsman building intricate, inlaid jewelry boxes, for which he won first place in an international competition in Seattle a couple of years ago.  He knows a thing or two about blades.  He has saws and planes that shave wood so thin you can read through it; so he doesn’t just know about blades, he knows about sharpening them.  According to Lew, smooth surfaces do not sharpen.  What’s required to sharpen is an abrasive.  He has a series of stones that range from very coarse to very fine, and only through those abrasive surfaces can a fine edge be developed.  He said the coarse stones are necessary at first to remove debris, corrosion and oxidation from the blade, and only after the initial removal of the imperfections is it possible to begin to finely sharpen the instrument for use.

So the question remains:  Who packs your parachute?  Who removes your debris, corrosion and oxidation?  In Proverbs 17, Solomon says it’s not through flattery that we are sharpened, but by the abrasive of a caring brother:

Wounds from a friend can be trusted. (v. 6)

The pleasantness of one’s friend springs from his earnest counsel. (v. 9)

Being a Jonathan is hard work.  It requires us to speak words of truth as well as words of comfort – one moment an abrasive to sharpen a friend’s focus, the next moment a touch of compassion to comfort and heal.  But it’s always hard work.  Abraham Lincoln said,  “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.”

Lew also told me about the master temple builders in Japan who, only after 30 or 40 years of experience, are honored to work on temple construction.  Because they consider their work on the temples so holy, before they use their tools, they will completely disassemble a plane and sharpen it to a surgical edge.  After putting it back together, they make one pass down the length of a wooden beam, stop, disassemble the plane, and re-sharpen it again for the next pass.  Their reasoning is that their work is so holy, it would be a sacrilege to use anything less than a perfectly sharpened blade for a divine purpose

So the second question is this:  How often should we be sharpened by our caring community?  The answer is:  before every use.  Before we go out into the world each day, let’s sharpen ourselves through prayer, time in God’s word, and a friend with permission to speak the truth.  That will make us temple builders – temples not built with human hands, but craftsmen and women that build into the body of Christ, the temple of the Spirit.