I want to be a Screwdriver

Do you ever have one of those random conversations, where you end up on a topic, with no particular recollection of how you got there? This occurred to me over Christmas, when talking to Louise. As in the film “Inception”, “In a dream, you never ask how you got to this point.” Perhaps most of my conversations are like this.

Anyway, this particular conversation alighted on the point of why God ever bothered to create this world and in particular, us. In the usual man-centred view, we think about “us” or “me”. We think in terms of what God does for us or should do for us, and ask why things happen to us. The thought of what God gets from this, leaves us scratching our heads, either at the question itself (“What sort of question is that?”) or leaving us perplexed as to a plausible answer. (An acceptable and realistic response is certainly “I don’t know”.)

Nevertheless, you may have your own answer. The nearest that I could come up with was a mixture of Old Testament, when, for example, God talks about “Making a Nation for my own Name” and the “New Testament”, as it describes the (spiritual) Church (being the totality of all those who trust God, and not to be confused with the organisations that go by the same name).

The theory that we talked about was that God has a role for us in this “Building” and that this role is pre-defined. In the initial drawings and specifications for God’s “Spiritual Building”, there are hundreds and thousands of different parts, all important, but not all visible. The parts that visible are the most noteworthy. “Perhaps I can apply for the post of a Prophet; a minor one would be alright”.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. God writes the specifications and the parts, and allots us roles within this. We cannot all be Great Doors, or Magnificent Windows. We do not get a vote. Of course, we can choose not to follow the route, to object to it, to be puzzled by it, to doubt it.

But if I could apply for a role, I would be a screwdriver. Pretty small and insignificant in the overall scheme of things, but occasionally very useful in some specialised way. It spends most of its time doing nothing, just being a screwdriver, waiting to be used to do what it does best; screwing in screws.