Hammer time

On the desk in my office is a small rocking horse. No, not an anxious Shetland pony – a hand-sized, wooden, rocking horse toy.

It’s the result of a book I read years ago on management, and the toy reminds me that working harder does not always equate to greater success. You can rock and rock all day on a rocking horse, raise a real sweat – and go absolutely nowhere. It’s about working smarter not harder.

So, the small toy on my desk serves as a visual reminder of how I should be working. It’s not to say I don’t work hard or disapprove of those who do; it just reminds me to work in a smart way and keep my brain switched on.

I think the move from the toy horse to what it symbolises is a straightforward step to take. Over the years, however, I’ve heard some preachers, especially, make some interesting leaps in symbolic messages. At this point, I should declare that I’m not a huge fan of symbolism (despite my toy horse); I’m too much of a realist and very pragmatic.

One officer was preaching on Lamentations and read a sad passage before laying a black silk scarf across the lectern and saying that it represented the sorrow of the Israelites. In my mind, I said, “No, it’s a black scarf.”

When I was a teen, I listened to my corps officer preach about giving God control in our lives. He compared it to giving God the steering wheel and letting him ‘drive’. He then spent the next few minutes speaking while bouncing up and down and side to side, pretending to hold and turn a steering wheel. I couldn’t listen to what he was saying, as I thought we were about to crash.

When people do the ‘fake driving’ thing, they don’t tend to hold the wheel still like they’re driving straight down a road, they turn the wheel from side to side like they’re zig-zagging wildly all over the place. His message said to me: God’s driving us in a dodgem car!

Another officer declared that we were all butterflies God was preparing (in a cocoon?) to be beautiful, free, soaring creatures for him. It was a little cliched, but I appreciated her point. Then she asked us all to stand (I thought, ‘Uh, oh, here we go’), and she instructed us to flap our arms as we turned around and around, pretending to be butterflies.

Maybe it’s a gender thing, but you’ve never seen a room of more embarrassed men. We flittered, fluttered, spun and waved and tried not to make eye contact. That is, apart from one older soldier who refused to stand and sat there with his arms crossed – still, I concluded, in his cocoon.

And, finally, there was the officer who was leading a Good Friday service and invited us to step forward and hammer a nail into a wooden cross resting on the floor, something many preachers have done over the years. It was meant to symbolise how it was our sinful state and, in some way, us who nailed Christ to the cross.

What he didn’t count on was the Roberts boys. While one was hammering in his nail, the other began hammering him. Screams and threats ensued as one hammer-holding brother chased the other hammer-holding brother. The boys were okay, the screams and threats were from their mother, who was having not-such-a-good Friday!

–      Major Mal Davies is Assistant Divisional Commander for the Victoria Division.