On the Common 204

What's a fruit machine?

Hi everyone!

Well, it’s almost August, a fact I can hardly believe. This year has flown by more than most in my recent memory. Last week we welcomed a few different large families with little ones into our home, which is always a good time.

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The Part Where There’s an Essay: The Repair Shop

The other night, my son and I watched an episode of “The Repair Shop.” If you don’t know it, this gentle British reality show features craftspeople fixing things. The main personalities are trained in the skills that are going by the wayside in the twenty-first century. They are seamstresses, clockmakers, mechanics, and the like. People bring them treasured antiques that are worn out or broken, and these craftsmen return them—at least part of the way—to their former glory.

The episode we saw featured a repair to a “fruit machine.” I was not familiar with this term, but allow me to enlighten you now. This is a fruit machine:

We Americans call it a slot machine, and I believe both sides of the pond agree on the nickname “one-armed bandit.”

We saw the repairman gently disassemble the machine. He pulled out the mechanism that was stuck, and called over his buddy the clock expert for a consult. They agreed that a good cleaning was in order. Once that piece was removed, they found a discarded piece of metal which had been left inside. The machine had been retooled when the currency size changed, but the former repairman had lazily left the old pieces inside the machine, impeding the operation.

Eventually the parts were cleaned, the trash was discarded, and the reassembly began. All the legitimate, valuable parts returned to their spots and settled into place. When everything was finally restored, the repairman slotted a coin into place, pulled the arm, and the mechanism sprang to life. The gears turned, the wheels spun, and the weights brought the fruit to a halting stop at random: one, two, three. It worked!

It brought to mind for me the quote from CS Lewis about how God starts “knocking about” inside Christian’s lives. In the “house” of our Christian lives, we want to allow him to move a chair here or there; he wants to take out walls and build new wings.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

I hope you will forgive the double metaphor.

Too often when I am resenting the Holy Spirit’s uncomfortable work in my life, it’s because I am thinking too small. I think I must have reached the end of that bit of construction; I am on to the next. Our sanctification is certainly progressing, with bits of progress building on bits of progress, little by little. But I don’t think it feels that way to us—often we are still wondering why our rooms are being cleaned out and rearranged—and why can’t we just hold onto that pile of trash lying over there by the wall? It’s not hurting anything.

So we Christians live in the tension of both being perfect and being sanctified simultaneously. We believe that Christ’s work on our behalf is complete, but we strive for greater delight and purer fruit in our lives. We trust that ultimately, God will bring the results, and we will ultimately be remade.

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For the Anglophiles

Dear Me, England: Please be so kind as to allow me another World Cup article. “England’s World Cup was the story of a brilliant, rational, strong-willed outsider hopelessly overwhelmed by native forces he couldn’t comprehend. It was a story of ancestors rising from the dead to reclaim their descendants. Sure, you can cultivate your ‘mentality,’ they seemed to whisper to this admirable, talented team. But you can’t escape who you are. You are ours. You are English.”

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Reads & Listens of the Week

This is the best idea for a website in a very long time: Worse on Purpose. Find out which companies make what stuff, and how they work towards that goal that my engineer husband refers to as “designed obsolescence.”

I found this conversation fascinating: A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory for Why the World Feels So Weird. The word is “uni-context.” If you’d rather read than listen, you can find that summary right here.

The Courage in Encouragement: “…courage is essential if you want to invite someone into the unvarnished reality of your life and to stay present when they invite you into theirs. Encouragement matters because endurance matters. Life will throw punches. Disappointment will come. The encouraging friend isn’t the one who denies the pain or rushes past lament. The encouraging friend stands ringside and puts courage into you, calling you up and forward.”

I’ve been enjoying Mumford’s new one recently.

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If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you will find it quite intolerable; think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.

— C.S. Lewis, from the interview “Answers to Questions on Christianity.”