Pocket Knives and a Winchester™ Hatchet

We sat alone at the antique table sometime after midnight just outside the city limits of Spokane. My friend John, a cowboy horse breeder and skilled plastic surgeon and I shared a cup of his specialty brewed coffee cooked over a coleman stove. As I carefully listened to the painful words of my cowboy friend, from the corner of my eye I watched the skilled hands of a surgeon fondling  a small pile of pocket-knives lying on the linen table cloth. "These were  my dad's knives ."  John had just returned from his father's funeral in Wichita, Kansas and these few momento's  were the silent reminders of the past - the haunting characters that brought a cold reality that his father's life was now over. The enemy had claimed another victim, and whittled another notch on his belt of grief. The touch of my friend's hands on the  broken steel blade of a pearl handled pocket-knife revealed the dull ache of regret in his chest over losing a father that he had loved and yet had not really known as his friend.

In an oak framed glass cabinet were several western hats that my good friend wore, some daily, some saved just for special occasions like when we went to church together. Among his prized head-wear, rested a small hatchet that also belonged to his dad. The brand mark on the head said Winchester™ . "I've never seen another one like it," John said, as he  briefly held the darkened handle and laid it carefully back in its place.

John talked of a tool box from which his father had worked. He mentioned that on the next trip back home he was going to restore the tool box the way it was when his father used it in his work. A handyman of sorts, Jabez, John's dad, had raised his boys in a Christian home the best he could. He fed them, clothed them, and tried to teach them about what really mattered in life. Nothing elaborate or fancy.  He would come home sometimes angry and overbearingly stern , "Why isn't this chore done!?" "Why haven't you done this!?"  Perhaps frustrated expressions of a life that might have been.  Perhaps loving demands that his boys do better than he. Perhaps a bit of both.

Pocket  knives, a hatchet, and a tool box. Prized possessions. Often touched.  Often admired. And used to carve out a living by a simple man from Kansas. Watching my friend hold those simple objects in his hand it was as though his hands became the hands of his father caressing the pear-handled pocket knife. They now had a special symbolism that would remind my companion for the rest of his life.  Each time he looked at them, each time the cold steel head of the Winchester™  hatchet was sharpened,  a man's life would be remembered. He would never look at these simple objects through his own eyes again, but through the eyes of his father.

I wonder how many times Jesus went to the dusty carpenter shop after Joseph's death?  How many times had he rearranged his dad's tool box  and smirked a bit thinking of the expression on Joseph's face as he slammed his thumb with a hammer, maybe wanting to yell in anger, ... all the time knowing that God was holding up the other end of the board?  Did Jesus ever regret not raising Joseph from the dead?  Did a silent tear drip from his cheek when he held his dad's bridle? Simple possessions of a man take on a new meaning when he dies.

"Do this in remembrance of me." Simple objects - a piece of unleavened bread and a bit of juice from a grape.   They too are simple reminders of the past.  But more than that, they are declarations of the future.  Testimonies, not that the enemy had claimed another victim or whittled another notch on his belt of grief, but that the enemy had now become the victim!

"For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes!" To the casual observer, a piece of cracker and a sip of juice are pretty insignificant. Kind of like an old pocket knife, or box of old tools, or a Winchester™ hatchet. Insignificant, that is, until you can visualize a man's life through them, and touch them with his hands and see their meaning through his eyes.