My bookshelf ’s straight lines and
perfect symmetry showed no sign of
error or variation in the manufactured
grain.
The wood on his shelf was a strange
mix of chaos. The grains danced
unpredictably. The wood’s character
wouldn’t submit to any craftsman, and
the skilled carpenter didn’t try.
Seeing my confusion, David explained
that his “qualified buyers” value one
thing a piece like mine would never
have: the work of a human hand.
For those who have eyes to see, an
overly processed shelf lacks humanity
and honesty, because it’s not a real
piece of wood. It’s composite wood,
which is a nice way of saying it’s glued
together sawdust. A manufactured
piece of wood can be made to submit to
our expectations of perfection because
it’s our own creation, but a piece of oak
mocks our attempts. The stubbornness
of real wood is the most valuable part,
because that’s the most honest part.
No matter how hard we try, it will be
what it is, not what we will it to be.
Attempts to distance us from the
dust divorce us from ourselves. Our
airbrushing of ourselves on social
media and every deceptive utterance
of “Oh yeah, I’m doing good” strip us of
our God-given duality, turning us into
composite characters.
We are not filtered and “Oh yeah, I’m
doing good” creatures.
We are both broken and beautiful.
To the trained eye, our honest humanity
can become the most valuable thing
we have to offer, because that’s what
unites all of us. No one has ever
connected with someone because they
have a perfect life, a perfect spouse, a
perfect bank account, and 2.5 kids in
matching clothes on the lawn of their
cookie-cutter suburban home next to
an SUV adorned with a 13.1 bumper
sticker.
When someone’s life is perceived (and
don’t for one second think it’s anything
other than a perception) as too smooth,
In the second creation story, God took
the dust of the ground (in Hebrew, the
word is adama) and breathed into it the
divine breath, creating the first man,
named Adam, which is the generic
Hebrew word for “man.”
We are the dust from the ground infused
with the divinity from above.
We are a mixture of dust and divine.
Solutions • 49