I spent ten years of my life building fence. Or in other words I was a Specialist in the installation of livestock management systems! As part of my job I acquired what my sister and I call “tensile thumbs”, which means that I can straighten high tensile wire with my fingers, just one of those weird facts that made my life a lot easier. I can also switch to a pliers/wire cutter for the same purpose. All this to say I always wondered how God would use me with these “special” skills. I’m not a people person, especially since I spent most of the last four years in some corner of a field by myself, with my tools, and listening to music. I’m also more of a “buck up and deal with it” type, meaning I’m not very sympathetic. If I had to choose between a chainsaw in the woods and cooking in the kitchen I’d most likely take the chainsaw in the woods.
If you’ve stuck with me this far here is my point; God uses fence builders.
This month I’m in El Alto Bolivia working in a rehab center for girls between the ages of 13-23. Our days “typically” look like; arriving at 9:00, Two of us help in the kitchen while the rest of us help at other projects…cleaning, decorating for Christmas… After lunch two of us help clean up then spend the rest of the day hanging out with the girls, playing soccer… which also translates to a lot of slow time especially with the language barrier since it’s very difficult to carry on a conversation and like I said I’m not a people person. So this month has been very stretching for me.
However the highlight of my month was putting my “tensile thumbs” to use. At the girls house we were going to set up the Christmas tree, a fake tree that was supposed to be in three pieces and easy to put together, “supposed to”. That however was not the case as the thing came out of the box in every piece possible. I wasn’t there for the initial conversation but since a team-mate knew I had a Leatherman with pliers they wondered if they could borrow it to fix the tree, Amy and I tackled the job of trying to save the Christmas tree. I soon found that it was easier to bend the wire around the poles with my hands, here’s where the thumbs came in handy.
As I was sitting there wrapping wires around these “tree” poles and wondering if this was even worth the effort the girls came in and saw what I was doing, they smiled, so I kept going. About 50 pieces of tree later we were finished think Charlie Brown Christmas tree only slightly worse. The girls quickly brought out the decorations and soon had that tree looking better than I thought possible.
Who knew that wire bending would come in handy!
