A New Twist on an Old Summer Camp Story
Part of the “evening ritual” at the 4-H summer camp I worked at while I was in college was the vesper talk designed to help our campers reflect on their days and perhaps the larger meaning of life. We had a pool of stories that we would regularly recycle. Thank goodness the kids were only there two weeks or else we would have run out of material.
One of my favorite talks involved a somewhat mean kid whose dad wanted to teach him a lesson by giving him a 12” log, a hammer, and a sack of 5” nails. “For this next week,” he instructed, “every time you do or say something that hurts someone, drive a nail it into the log.”
If you ever endured poison ivy, mosquito bites and bug juice at summer camp, you might have heard this story and know where it’s heading. But don’t bail on me. After I get to the punchline, I’ll present a new angle I hope you will appreciate.
The son thought his dad had lost it. “What’s with the nails in the log? What’s that supposed to do?” But he agreed to comply and by the end of the week, the log resembled a porcupine with nails sticking out everywhere.
“Now,” said the dad, “for this next week, every time you do something kind, I want you to pull one of the nails out.” Realizing how many bad things he had done, the son felt some degree of remorse and tried to make up by going out of his way to do and say kind things. And, voila, by the end of the week all the nails were gone.
Although the dad was pleased by his son’s attempt to compensate, he pointed out that even though the nails were gone, the holes in the log weren’t.
Our little sermonette to the campers stressed that even if they tried to “undo” some of the harm they had done, the damage couldn’t be erased. So just don’t be mean. That’s an important lesson, and many of the kids took it to heart.
But I recently thought of a way to recast this story to reflect an even more significant lesson.
Instead of the log representing my relationship with others, think about it as my own soul. And instead of driving a nail into the log when I hurt someone, think about it as driving a hole in my soul every time I sin.
The overwhelming majority of people – religious or not – would say they try to compensate for their shortcomings by doing good things to balance the scales. It’s the old “If my good deeds outweigh my bad ones, God – if there is one – will accept me.”
As this old camp story teaches, though, even when the nails are removed, the holes can’t be. And in my new version, the nail holes are not damage done to others but damage to my own soul.
The Christian message as taught in the Bible is that I can never fill the holes in my core being caused by my sin. And those sins separate me from God.
It would be depressing if the message stopped there. But it doesn’t. The rest of the story is that Jesus can and will fill those holes if we ask him to. And he is the only one who can.
As important as it is to realize the negative implications of our bad behavior on others, it’s more important to recognize what it does to my relationship with God. And even more important is finding the only true remedy to my alienation from God caused by my sin. And that is confessing my rebellion against or indifference to God, claiming Jesus’ forgiveness, and committing my life to him.
I hope you can relate to my revised adaptation of this story.
One last thing. The lesson from the original version still rings true. Even though Jesus can and does repair the devastation to the souls of people who recognize their need and turn to him, relational and sometimes even legal consequences remain. So, let’s not forget the implications of our behavior on others.
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To what extent do you believe that, in God’s eyes, your good deeds can make up for you bad ones?
Have you ever gotten to the point of recognizing that nothing you can do will make you acceptable to God but that Jesus’ perfect life, death and resurrection can do just that if you turn to him?
. . . [T]he wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal like through Christ Jesus our Lord – Romans 6:23 (New Living Translation)