Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

The world makes more sense once you understand this: Everyone is broken inside.  And we are all broken in our own way.

One way we deal with this brokenness is through religion. For my part, I am a Christian and Christianity embraces this.

We are broken inside, but we can do things to help us function regardless of that fact.

I find that, while worship can do wonders for us, physically working on a common project along with other members of my church is even better. Earlier this summer, we got together and threw away a bunch of stuff that needed throwing away.

This is hard work, but not just physically. Everything I looked at either reminded me of someone who was dead or made me wonder about the forgotten person behind it.

Among that stuff was a couple of old altars that had been set aside during renovation.  They were scheduled to be put in a roll-off.  At that point another woodworker and I looked at each other and, without too many words, came to a decision: We needed to save something from these altars.

He did most–virtually all–of the work, but I managed to get a piece off of the front of one.  It looked to be skillfully carved.  There were works along the front: “THIS DO IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME.”  On one end of this, there was a cluster of grapes and on the other was a shock of wheat.  These carvings are there to represent the elements of the Lord’s Supper.

That is, they looked like carvings.  They were in fact molded from clay.

The wood was oak.  That is true. However, when examined more closely, it wasn’t solid. I say that like it was a discovery, but I knew as big as the panels of the altar were that they weren’t all made of one piece. Big panels are usually glue ups. In this wood, they had taken three-quarter inch by one-inch pieces that were over three feet long and glued them into a panel that was several feet long.  Then they hand laminated both sides with solid sheets of oak that were about a 16-th of an inch thick.

This sounds like a cheat on first blush, and I am not going to argue with anyone about it, but there is no mistaking one thing: This wood was solid and it was beautiful.

One of the very practical men who was working with us asked an incredibly natural question: “What are you going to do with this?

We both gave the same honest answer: “I don’t know.”

I did get an idea, though, that ripened over the summer: A box.  I would make a box.

The constraint was that I needed to preserve the words of Jesus and the symbols of the elements.  I decided that I would make a long box with the words down the side and I would put the grapes as one end and the wheat as the other.  This left the other long side blank which kind of breaks the symmetry, but that side could be kept against a wall. 

This is a long box and gluing up large projects is inherently problematic, as we shall see. But I decided the best way to proceed was to make a frame.  

I made my frame from solid yellow pine. It’s not nearly as beautiful as oak, in my opinion, but it is a lot cheaper. And it is more solid than you might think. Things might’ve gone a bit better if I had used screws in my joinery, but I have my prejudices, so I decided to just use glue with the least number of screws I could get by with. 

I’d cut my pieces carefully. I had marked how they should be oriented. I began my assembly process. Things seemed to be going well. All of the frame was together and attached to the pieces I wanted to preserve.

But…

But I looked over, and some of the pieces of my frame were upside down. I thought for a second that I could disassemble it, but my glue had set. (Titebond III is a really good clue, but it dries very fast.)

The net effect was that the box was not perfectly square. It was solid. It was solid. 

But it was ugly.

I spent hours over the succeeding weeks to figure out ways to attempt to cover the ugliness. I was successful to a certain degree. 

But it’s not perfect.

Just like me.  

It will function to hold and protect anything held within it.  It will carry the words of Jesus with it. 

I would do well to do the same.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com. He invites you to visit the blog and to subscribe.