Hammering

On my mind because of Jake's entry on receiving God's love, an excerpt from Edge of Eternity, by Randy Alcorn:

I heard the sound of someone pounding with a hammer, but it was a dull tearing sound, not the crisp, loud sound of nails driven into wood. Where was it coming from?

I heard jingling metal and looked around me and saw people pulling things from their pockets. I reached into my left pocket and pulled out… a handful of nails.

I saw now that each person had a hammer. I watched motionless as person after person positioned nails on the Woodsman’s giant feet.

“No!” I shouted. “What has he done to you?”

What horrified me most was that the people seemed so normal, even nice.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” a woman in a white nurse’s uniform asked me as she positioned a nail and hammered it five times until it was buried to its head in the Woodsman’s foot.

“Where’s your hammer?” asked a businessman in suit and tie. “Here’s an extra. Glad to share.”

I took the hammer. It hung limp in my right hand. After watching this for a few minutes, it seemed less horrible. Before I knew it, I was thinking about how big the Woodsman was, how distant he was, and how little he cared about me, and how he hadn’t made my life go the way I wanted, and how he thought he was better than me and had dared to cast blame on me. I took the hammer and started pounding nails into his heel, first one and then another and another.

I hammered nails feverishly, harder and harder. No matter how many nails I took out of my pocket, it was still full.

Then I thought about the Woodsman, about how much this must be hurting him. The individual nails might have felt like a pinprick, but the cumulative effect of all those people pounding all those nails must have been agonizing.

I began to weep and threw down my hammer and tried to pull away, but I could only get so far, so I picked my hammer back up and did what everyone else was doing.

For another stinging moment, I grasped the horror of what I was doing. I cried. After wiping my eyes, I grew angry at how I’d suffered, how my dad wasn’t there for me and how my family had abandoned me. I picked the hammer back up, pulled the replenished stock of nails out of my picket, and started pounding again. The more I swung the hammer, the easier it became, the more automatic. Blood of the innocent, shed at my whim and convenience. It wasn’t the first time, I thought, then immediately pushed back nagging memories to the dark corners of my mind. No – what I’d done and what I was doing were reasonable and just. And besides, everyone else was doing it.

The great foot trembled, as if in a spasm, but did not move away from me. For a fleeting moment I wondered why I was punishing the Woodsman for what the beast had done, for what I had done, for what others had done to me. But in the next moment it all seemed perfectly logical. It felt so good to be in control, to determine my own destiny, to choose to do something with my hands, something that made a difference. I was in charge, the Woodsman was at my mercy-and I showed him none.

I saw in the sky, above the Woodsman, the great general of the army of light come down and bow before his commander in chief in midair. “Let us destroy them now, Master-please.”

“Michael,” replied the woodsman in a tired, hurting voice, “you know if that was what I wanted I could unmake them all in a single moment or destroy them merely a thought.”

“But why, Master, do you not let us protect You and defend Your honor? Why do you let them torture you?”

The Woodsman’s wet eyes drooped. “Because… it is the only way to save them.”