Today I finished the long and arduous task of tearing out the rotten floor of my garage. Before my parents had bought this house, the garage had been set down on a floor platform made of huge planks and beams resting on the ground. Six inch nails held the planks to the beams. The wood even though rotting in places was old growth Douglas fir and held the rusting nails tightly.
So I was excited when I brought home a new and longer crow bar with a J shaped end for pulling up nails. Even better, it was bright yellow. Because it was late and beginning to rain when we got home from the hardware store, I only tried it on one nail. It came right out.
This morning I attacked the other nails with my new yellow bar. They did not come out as easily, but one by one they came—even though I had to stop and wipe the sweat from my eyes. I thought about how satisfying it is to have a bar stronger than these rusty nails and that the Word of God is to persistent sin what this yellow bar is to six inch nails. Wow! I could write a little blog about how the truth of God’s Word is the best tool for pulling sinful habits out our lives.
As I was about to put up my wrecking bar, I saw a nail I had overlooked at the end of a cross-beam. The nail was already sticking up about two inches, so for better leverage I put a 2×4 under the J. I pulled and I pushed on my end, but the only sound was the bar crushing the 2×4. I beat the side of the nail to loosen the rust and the grip of the wood and then got into a stance that allowed me to pull as hard as possible. My end of the bar was slowly getting lower so I assumed I was making some progress.
Again I wiped away the sweat and caught my breath only to discover that the end of new wrecking bar was no longer a J or even an L. It wasn’t completely straight now, but it had bent enough so I could no longer pull nails with it. The yellow paint had cracked and peeled where the steel had bent.
I got the beam out of the garage, but the nail is still in it. I am going to take the wrecking bar back to Farr’s Hardware. It was like a toy broken before Christmas day ended—so sad. And of course, I am left with this lame excuse for a blog posting. Like it says, or should say, in the Psalms, “The flower may fade, the mountain crumble, and the wrecking bar bend, but the word of the Lord endures forever.”
