How to Use a Drill

How to Use a Drill--July 30, 2018

"When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, 'You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." [Mark 10:41-45]

Okay, safety lesson Number One: you don't point a drill at your face.  You just don't.

In case it were not already abundantly self-evident why it is a bad idea to point a drill at your face, let's say it out loud.  A drill is a tool with a particular purpose, namely, to make holes in things.  It makes holes really well when it is plugged in and someone pulls the trigger, but even if it is not plugged into the electrical outlet, the end of the drill bit is meticulously designed to be sharp, solid, and piercing.  One false move, one clumsy stumble on the rug with the wrinkle in it, and you could have a hole in your face, or at least a nasty cut.  Even if it's just a slight chance of injury, the smart move is to point your drill away from yourself, no matter what, even when you are just walking from the toolbox to your project.  Drills and faces are never a good combination.

Or, to put it slightly less graphically, as a rule, power tools are meant to be pointed away from oneself.  That is simply the right way to use them.  And a tool is, by definition, meant for something else--it is a means to an end, an object used to accomplish something else.  Just having a tool for its own sake is meaningless--you don't go and buy a hammer, a screwdriver, or a drill, simply to accumulate them. They are meant to be used in service of making, fixing, or building other things.  And for the well-being of everybody around, keep your power tools pointed away from yourself.  Consider this the voice of experience here.

Jesus reminds us, too, that what is true of power tools is true of power itself.  Power is never rightly used by pointing it at yourself--using it to puff yourself up, to secure your own interests, or to accumulate other stuff for yourself.  Neither is power an end in and of itself, according to the rabbi from Nazareth; just like it is nonsense to say, "I bought this hammer so that I can acquire more hammers," it is a misunderstanding of power to say, "The purpose of power is to acquire more power." No. No. No.

That's not to say that people don't try.  (But hey, I know people who point drills at their faces, too, and that doesn't make it a good idea.)  Of course, history--and the headlines--are full of examples of folks bent on pointing a power drill at their own eyes, people who treat power like it is intended for their own benefit.  They have accumulated some amount of power--whether being the president of your local book club, getting elected to Congress, or crowning yourself dictator of France like Napoleon--and they proceed to aim that power at themselves, for their own benefit, for their own protection, for their own comfort.  Jesus says that was the accepted understanding of all the surrounding nations in the first century: "among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them."  It is the great fundamental misunderstanding of humanity--we keep making the same critical error of pointing a drill at our own faces, when it was never meant to be pointed at ourselves.  Power tools, and power itself, are simply not meant to be directed back at the one who holds it, no matter how many other people are doing it. No matter how much we think it has become "the new normal," no matter how loud the powerful folks bellow and shout and threaten, and no matter whether it is on the large or small scale, power is simply not meant to be used only to benefit the one who has it.  If you have power, it is meant for the creation of something good for all, for the mending of what is broken, for the fixing of what is out of whack.

And there is the beginning of the radical difference between the way of Jesus and the way of every other king, emperor, prime minister, and president in the dustbin of history.  Jesus offers an alternative.  Jesus points the drill away from himself--which turns out to be exactly the right way to hold such a powerful tool, after all--and he points his power away from himself.  Jesus says that the right way to use power is to use it to place yourself in service to others.  The right way to use power is to lay your life down for others.  The right way to use power is to put yourself last and to put others first.  That is, simply put, the purpose of power, like the purpose of a drill is to point it away from your face and into the wood so that you can assemble the desk you are building.  

The fact that Jesus' use of power to serve (rather than to be served) seems backwards to us is evidence of just how screwed up we all are, not that Jesus is wrong.  Jesus has begun a community of people who dare to use power differently from all the "tyrants," "great ones," and "lords" of history and the present day.  We will be people who lay down our lives, not because we are powerless to do otherwise like helpless victims, but by our conscious choice to use power in the right way: for the sake of those who do not have power.  We will be people who risk our own comfort, our own convenience, and our own well-being, the way Jesus gave his life as "a ransom for many," not because someone else coerces us to do it, but because that is the right way to exercise our power.  We choose to give it away.  We choose to give ourselves away.  We choose to use the drill the right way--to point it away from our own faces.

Think of what good things we could build... what broken things could be restored... if we quit pointing the drill at our own faces and actually got to work using both our power and power tools by using them for the sake of others?  My goodness, it's almost like that's what they were meant for all along...

Lord Jesus, turn our aim away from ourselves and outward to the well-being of all, just as you used your power to lay down your life for the sake of the world.