The Right Tools & The Right Access

Any job is easier if you’ve got the right access and the right tools! I’ve been working on some things around the house the last couple weeks and this truth has jumped up and smacked me in the face more than a few times. Thankfully, the hammer has not followed suit!

Our bathroom needs a fan, which requires a little crawling around in the attic. No big deal, except… Years ago, previous owners built an addition, including relocating the bathroom, but when they did they just built the new roof over the top of the old one. Maybe this is common practice when adding on to an existing structure (what do I know?!) but it seems ridiculous to me. It leaves almost no space to work in if you need to! Pull out all your trigonometric skill and tell me the space created inside a triangle with two 12 degree corners. (Incidentally, why is there no symbol on our keyboards for degrees? We have them for % and $ and # and &… why no degrees?!) Ok, back to the trigonometry. The answer is… not enough!

I’m a small guy without any claustrophobic qualms, but I couldn’t even manage to climb through the 15″ hole, make the 90 degree turn and crawl 20′ through the attic to get to the spot where I needed to put in a fan. That’s not even considering dragging the necessary tools up there! I needed access. To get it, I had to borrow the right kind of saw to cut through the old roof. My circular saw was too bulky to fit in the right space. My jigsaw was too short to cut through all the layers. My drill and hammer are not saws at all! So, after borrowing the right tool & cutting a much larger hole, I now have the access I need. (Motivation and focused time to work in the attic is another issue!)

While the bathroom still waits for its fan, the kitchen is just about done waiting for its new floor. There’s no access issue there but I was quickly confronted with the need for the right tools. We got an easy tongue in groove type of laminate floor that basically snaps together. I’ve got a wood block and hammer to tap everything in tight, but when it comes to the end of a row, there’s no way to tap the piece into place because the wall is in the way. I needed the right tools. Enter the pull bar; a 10 inch slice of metal with an angle on one end to fit down over the piece of laminate, and an opposite tab on the other end to pound tap with the hammer in order to pull the piece into place. Nice and easy.

The thing here is, neither of these jobs is very complicated or difficult – with the right access and tools. Without those, though, there’s no way the job gets done.

Life is like that. With the right access and tools, life works.

Church is like that, too. We have a job to do. As Christ’s ambassadors, we are to represent His Kingdom here on earth. If we don’t make use of the tools His Spirit has given us in His Body, we’ll struggle to do well. If we ignore the access to His Spirit in our lives, we’ll only accomplish what we can do under our own power. We’ll bang around and make a lot of noise, but we’ll probably make a huge mess without accomplishing what He’s put us here to do. We could even injure ourselves and others trying to make due with the wrong tools.

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I’ll be digging in to some of the tools and access that we need in the next few posts and could use your help to shape them. What tools do you feel are the most important to your life? What do you need access to currently to follow where Christ is leading?

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