By Jordan Dillon
I didn’t know that I thought I was invincible until the moment I realized that I wasn’t. It’s an assumption that I’d carried around until the age of 24. It was more than assumption though; it was an expectation. It was part of me. One brief moment separated that expectation from me.
As amateur weekend craftsmen, Brad and I would throw ourselves head first into projects that were hilariously, at times, above our skill level. I’ll never be able to forget the hauntingly askew set of leaning shelves that started out as a dream to be a jewelry armoire for Brad’s then-girlfriend. That dream became a woodworking nightmare that was barely qualified to be kindling. But I digress.
On one sunny spring afternoon we were using Brad’s table saw to precut some pieces for an Adirondack chair. We were a good team, each with our stronger skills working synergistically together. As was the routine, Brad would feed the boards from the front of the saw through to the back. I would grab the board and pull it safely through the end of the cut.
You have to be careful using a table saw. The blade spins toward the worker feeding it through, and this makes “kickback” a danger. Kickback happens when the 10-inch saw blade catches a board momentarily and the blade throws the board back at the craftsman before he can react. So you have to be aware, keep the board down and moving forward, and never stand directly behind the board being cut.
The teeth on a table saw alternate left, right, left, right. The metal blade sings as it spins toward the worker when the power switch is flipped on. The saw rips through wood of all kinds, colors, grains, and textures. You want to position the blade just above the top of the board for a clean through cut.
When I grabbed the next board that Brad was pushing through, I reached in a little too far and placed my left index finger on top of the spinning blade. The blade actually kicked my finger back up into the air. Brad and I met eyes. Then I looked at my finger. I was hit. The sound of that blade reverberating off of the concrete garage floor was deafening. I was mortal.
What still surprises me the most is the ease and coldness with which that blade ripped through my finger, and the ease with which I helplessly bled. I don’t mean to be gratuitously descriptive here, but the blood and the wound matter. They revealed my humanity and my vulnerability. They matter because sometimes we need blood to flow so we can fully grasp the point. Sometimes the blood helps make sense of absolutely everything else in life. Was it just my finger that was bleeding? Or was it my soul too?
The dominant Christian view of the makeup of the human being is that humans are one unified being with (at least) 2 parts, the body and the soul. The fancy ten-dollar word for this concept is ‘psychosomatic unity.’ ‘Psycho’ comes from the Greek for ‘mental’ or ‘spiritual,’ and ‘soma’ from the Greek for ‘body.’ So for the human being, what we do with our bodies we do with our souls, and vice versa. There is much more we could say about the implications of this concept, but this understanding will suffice for now.
This helps us understand more fully traditional Christian physical motions. For example, kneeling while we pray: when we kneel with our bodies, we kneel with our souls. When we greet others with a handshake or a hug, our souls greet one another in solidarity. This phenomenon works the other way as well. When we find ourselves weeping in our souls, our bodies manifest this pain in physical tears. Back to the workbench: when my body bleeds, my soul bleeds too. But what does this teach us?
It teaches us that not only are we mortal, fallible, and finite, but we are dramatically so. The things that wound us in life are sharp. They strike quickly. They leave permanent scars.
I still have the scar of the cut on my finger. I could see the jagged alternating saw teeth outline in my skin and flesh when it happened; now it is still a slightly off-color line with some extra sensitivity under the skin. These moments make us a little more cautious.
But I can’t live any longer in the assumption, or rather the illusion of being totally impenetrable. That arrogance makes the bleeding hurt even more. Because we didn’t even know it was possible, much less that it would hurt. But if we understand both our state of being susceptible to wounds as well as our unified human core, we see that we are cut much more than skin deep. We are cut soul deep as well and we can take the wounds and let it remind us that we place our trust in the One who was pierced for us, but overcame it once and for all.
Jordan Dillon is the lead machinist at Strataflo Products Inc, in Fort Wayne Indiana, where he lives with his wife and 3 children. Strataflo produces high quality check valves and Jordan has been with them for 14 years. Jordan also graduated in 2008 from Huntington University with a BA in Bible and Religion. Jordan has experience in both manufacturing and historic house restoration among other Midwestern life experiences and enjoys writing about all aspects of life as they interface with God’s Kingdom. Read more of his writing here.
Image: Zachary Smith.
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