New Year’s Day found me standing in the garage, looking over a huge mess. It was the remains of a busy holiday season spent building gifts for anyone who asked. In the mad dash to deliver every order, housekeeping had clearly taken a low priority.
There wasn’t room for a pathway from one end of my shop to the other. Tools were strewn across any surface with an empty space. A film of sawdust covered everything. Dozens of pieces of wood lay scattered about.
The time had come to begin this McAfee family’s tradition of cleaning up, throwing out, and getting ready for the new year.
Opening the garage door let in fresh air and daylight, so I grabbed Kim’s lawn blower and blew as much of the dust outside as possible. Then one at a time, I picked up each tool and coiled its cord before putting it into its proper place. That left the pieces of leftover lumber. I separated the larger pieces of wood by species and threw them into their cubby holes.
Then I turned my attention to the thin strips, short end cuts, and damaged pieces that were too small for any productive use. I managed to overflow four 5-gallon buckets.
When I hoisted the first bucket to dump it into the trash, I stopped suddenly. Instead of throwing them out, I spread them across my work table. Anyone else would have seen a mess, but these were my memories.
There was a scrap of dark brown walnut left from a table that I built for my niece, Gabrielle. It was part of a group of gifts for my nieces that I had hoped to use as a bridge of sorts between our families. Connecting across generations is harder than I thought it would be.
The pile included the last, small remnants of light-colored, hard maple from my dad’s workbench. It was as old as me, and I remembered him working over it when I was a child. My first, clumsy efforts at woodworking started there too. Although the bench is now gone, I used the best pieces to make my son, James, a personalized cutting board and also made smaller items for my daughter, Erin, and niece, Michal.
Rough-sawn strips lay in the middle of the pile. On a recent trip to the lumber mill, I had stumbled across a trove of pecan wood. It reminded me of my mom’s soft, Southern style and how much I have missed her. I bought a huge board and carried it home with no idea what to do with it. It became part of the hulking, 25-pound, Thor’s hammer in my brother, Preston’s garage gym. Ironically terrible with words, this gift was my way of telling him “I’m proud of you. Yep. You’re worthy.”
Short blocks of rose-tinted cherry were left from coasters that I have sent into every possible home. The engraved messages vary, but they are share the message that God loves you. They are part of my ministry to shine His light into the world.
Remnants of exotic purpleheart were in the mix. They were offcuts from a 30-year-anniversary gift for Kim. Purple is a favorite color of hers, so I had bought it to make my first Romeo and Juliet serving boards. It is hard to find a means to communicate how thankful you are to someone.
Bits of red oak were vestiges of a dining table we had bought at a furniture store in rural Tennessee when the kids were toddlers. They grew up around that table. When our home rennovation required a larger table, I had converted the top into our coffee table. The small leftovers reminded me of meals and craft projects from the old days.
Other oak scraps were left from a shadow box I built to honor my grandfather, who was killed in WW2. Reading the letters he wrote home and surveying his war records introduced me to a man I wish I could have met. His tragic story opened my eyes to events that formed my family and raised my compassion toward traits of my loved ones that I never understood before.
Flame-colored pieces of padauk were also there. I got a wild idea to make a cutting board with a checkerboard design reminiscent of the University of Tennessee’s end zone for my sister-in-law, Pam. Although she was a few years ahead of Kim and I, we were all on our own there for the first time. Our worldviews expanded in those campus classrooms and dormitories. Wow. We were just kids back then.
Last, there were white-colored leftovers from an ash board. Preston asked me to make him a deadlift jack for his gym. I chose ash because it gave the look of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Kelly, Preston, and I grew up on ball fields in Nashville, watching dad play church softball and ultimately years of our own Little League. In ways, we are still tethered together to that long ago place and time.
With a sigh, I realized that I couldn’t throw these away. There were too many memories. But scraps piled into buckets had no place in my new year.
I had seen videos of people building cutting boards in a “chaos style”. They used random pieces to create a cluttered, chaotic pattern. Kim offered to help me put one together.
For the next weeks, I converted the scraps. It was painfully slow to cut the small pieces from seven different wood species into common sizes and glue them together. Fourteen separate glue-ups and a half-gallon of glue later, all of the parts were in place.
After the assembly, it took four hours to flatten and smooth everything to a glass-like finish. Although, it was beautiful when the construction was complete, nothing is quite as rewarding as the beauty that emerges when the protectant oil is applied.
This is unlike most projects that I build where symmetry, consistency, and order define craftsmanship. It is magnificent because of the pandemonium. Its appeal arises from its distinctiveness.
Woodworkers call this a Chaos Board. I call it my Self-Portrait.
My life is made up of a seemingly infinite number of brief memories, circumstances, and people I care about. They all fit together to form an arrangement that is unique to me.
Only I can recognize many of the strange pieces that make up my portrait. When I stare too closely, some of the parts look crooked, off-size, or blemished. Sometimes I worry that people can’t see past my countless irregularities, eccentricities and conflicting attributes to find out who I really am.
Like this board, I can seem like a mess. All of us do.
But if we stop focusing on the tiny details and pull back to see the whole picture, a beauty begins to materialize. It’s not accident or happenstance, it reflects the magnificent intention with which God designed us.
Even before I started construction, this board was intended for my sister, Kelly. She has been with me as each memory was born and each piece was formed.
Like me, Kelly’s life can be a disarrayed tempest of commotion that can seem like a mess if you stare too closely. But that’s not how I see her. Her pieces fit together exactly as they were planned. I see a beauty God envisioned before the world was born.
If you look at yourself or others and see things that aren’t quite right, maybe you are overlooking the artistry. What can appear as flaws are actually a composition that was fearfully and wonderfully made.
Have faith in the Creator and seek out the beauty that He created. You are more than a chaos board.
