I am a faulty tool.
I have lived the past 23 years with a crippling, paralyzing, complete awareness of that fact, as one by one I saw nails bent under my imprecise blows, boards misaligned in accordance with my inaccurate measures, project after hard-wrought project crumbled—proving my greatest efforts to be impotent failings.
To face such reality has often proven too great a burden for my faulty-tool mind to bear. Under its weight, my gaze, my mind, my will, my soul has drifted downward year after year, buoyed only rarely by the momentary reprieve of an unsought, unexpected, undeserved peace.
How surprising those peaces are. How beautiful. How brief.
Soon another effort fails, and the burden returns with the same old realization: I am a faulty tool.
But that realization carries within it another, only recently recognized by my mind and the ramifications of which I have yet to grasp fully:
I am a tool. I am merely a tool.
Undeniably I was crafted for a purpose. It is my role to accomplish that purpose. And though I—when confronted by my own insufficiency to fulfill that purpose—might be overwhelmed by my own failure and self-doubt, I must admit that the Maker, in choosing to use me nonetheless, has bestowed upon me honor and privilege, not onus. Of all the vast selection of His creations, each, to my eye, infinitely better suited to the task at hand, He has chosen to take me up and apply my utility to His projects. This—the willingness to use me in spite of my malformed brokenness—is amazing grace.
Yet who am I, flawed as I am, to claim that He who crafted every atom of the universe in precise order went astray in forging me? In comparing myself to the hammers and drills and straightedges around me, I can’t help but notice that I was made different from them. I have, for 23 years, interpreted those differences as flaws. Only now have I begun to realize that that interpretation is a gross misunderstanding.
The truth is, a screwdriver is not a terribly deformed hammer. A crowbar is not a blunted drill. An auger is not the world’s worst straightedge. Rather, each is its own unique tool. Each of these, if applied to another’s task, would face failure at best and brokenness beyond repair at the worst. But when they are used, held firmly within the Workman’s hands, for their intended purpose, they prove their utility to be far greater than someone ignorant of their purpose might have guessed.
It is a difficult lot that we humans, we tools, have been assigned: to know—whether consciously or only deep within our souls—that we exist for a purpose, but rarely to be fully aware of what that purpose is. Yet it is through such a lot that we are granted the opportunity to trust, to have faith that the task placed before us this day, this very moment, is that for which the Maker has deemed us fit. And, in this trust, the burden that has so longed plagued our shoulders, the crushing weight of failures beyond our control, is surrendered to the One who has been wielding us all along.
We may not understand what we accomplish. We may not even see that the task exists at all. We may feel that we are but the thinnest file, and that this never-ceasing effort to pound nail after nail will leave us battered and broken beyond recognition and repair.
We may feel.
But the Maker knows. The Maker knows us, knows the task at hand, to an extent infinitely beyond our reckoning.
The Maker knows me infinitely beyond my reckoning. And I know what He has chosen to reveal to me:
That I am a tool.
That I am not a faulty tool.
That I simply don’t yet understand my role.