The Fix

When I decided to get into guitar building a few years ago, I started by learning as much as I could about the process.  One of the things I did was to purchase and watch a DVD on building a steel-string guitar by Robert O’Brien.  O’Brien studied luthiery in Brazil and worked there for a number of years before returning to the states.  He now lives in Boulder, CO, where he runs the guitar making department at Red Rocks Community College.  (This school has an amazing School of Fine Woodworking in which building stringed instruments—violins, mandolins, banjos, and classical, steel-string, and electric guitars is a major part.)

About a year ago I had a question about a guitar I was finishing, so I went to O’Brien’s website from which I emailed my question.  He very graciously replied almost immediately, and invited me to join his online forum on which other builders post questions and answers to problems, pictures of their recent successes, and other things related to luthiery. 

Robbie, as O’Brien is known by those who know him, recently posted a picture of his latest classical guitar which shows the bridge—the part of the soundboard that holds the strings—in its proper position but with about ¼” of unfinished wood showing in front. 

 The bridge is glued on after the finish (in this case shellac) is applied and buffed, so before finishing you must carefully measure where the bridge will be and mask this off with tape before applying the finish.

Here’s what happened in Robbie’s words:

“I measured and masked off the bridge a couple of weeks ago. I did the FP (French Polish—a method of applying shellac by hand) and let it cure. Yesterday before going to class, I once again measured, centered the bridge, removed the tape, checked everything etc. I then went in to class and was going to do a demo on how to use a vacuum jig to glue on a bridge. I once again had the ruler on the centerline and the bridge in position. Gregory then noticed that the bridge had been lined up at 662mm instead of 652mm!!! Yikes!!! How did that happen? Well, it so happens that they put the numbers 650 and 660 really close together on these rulers! I looked at the 650 and must have then neatly lined the front edge of the saddle slot with 660. Not only once but twice!! Once when masking off and once when removing the masking tape!!”

He had to scrape all the shellac off using a razor blade followed by sandpaper, measure correctly the bridge location, mask it off, then do the French Polish all over again.

I emailed Robbie and admitted to taking perverse satisfaction in knowing that someone as skilled and experienced as he can screw up, because I screw up all the time.  It’s very satisfying when a process works the way it’s supposed to in guitar building, but that’s a satisfaction I don’t experience near as much as the frustration when it doesn’t.  It seems inherent in any creative process that perfection is not only elusive but near impossible.  There are always things that aren’t going to go right, either because each piece of wood is different, or, mainly, because each builder is human and prone to making mistakes.  When one is made, the luthier is confronted with this decision: can this be fixed, or do I need to start over again?  Starting over again is, in some ways, the easy thing to do.  It’s a blunt instrument.  Trash the wood, get a new piece, and do it right the next time.  Fixing a problem requires more skill as it is often very fine work, but more than anything it requires creativity.  You have to look at the problem and envision what can be done.  When executed properly, the builder is the only one who can tell that a fix has been made.

Obviously, fixing a problem is to be preferred to starting all over again, as long as the end result is an instrument that is beautiful to look at, play, and listen to.  Robbie was able to fix his problem, and the result is a stunning instrument that yesterday sold for over $3,000 within hours of going on sale.

In the flood narrative of Genesis 6-9 God used the blunt instrument of starting all over again to fix the problem of human evil, violence, and sin.  And it didn’t work.

The Incarnation is God using his creativity to fix the problem.  God became human, suffered the brunt of humanity’s violent evil, and won.  None of us would have come up with this plan.  It’s ingenious. 

And if each of us will submit to his incarnational plan, the result, both in our lives and in the world, will be stunning.

New Favorite Christmas Decorations

I love when people decorate their houses at Christmas.  I like lots of lights--although it's kinda tacky when people go overboard, but that's OK.  Better overboard than underwhelming.

Outside Christmas decorations have gotten more and more sophisticated, but I have found my new favorite outside Christmas decoration.  No, it's not the computer-controlled, set-to-music dancing lights like this guy.

No, this gets my award for creativity:

Believing in Immanuel

The people who need the most to hear the news of Immanuel or “God is with us,” are the people who have the least reason to believe that he is.

When you live in relative comfort, it’s easy to believe in Immanuel.  “God is with us?  Well, of course he is.  Look around!  We have life, liberty, and most of us are pursuing, not merely survival, but happiness.  We have a great educational system, the best health care in the world, and a car for each driver in the household.  In a really bad economy 85% of us have jobs, and in a good economy that figure will rise to between 90-95%.  We have freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to have hundreds of channels on our flat screen T.V’s.  We go on vacations, see wonderful sights, experience amazing things.

“Of course God is with us.”

I’m not saying that any of this stuff is wrong or immoral, I’m just saying that the message of Christmas, that God is with us, doesn’t seem like such big news to most of us.  We’ve always believed that God is with us, right from the very beginning of our nation.

A word of caution is in order, however; in Jesus’ day, the people who had little problem believing that God was with them were the Romans.  They would have said, “Of course God is with us!  Look at the Roman Empire!  We have conquered many lands—who can do that unless the gods are with them?  We have wealth like the world has never seen.  Our citizens enjoy rights and privileges like citizens of no other lands.  We have a republican form of government that is fairer than any other form of government, and we endeavor to spread that to the barbaric lands that we conquer, bringing with us the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome.  God is with us?  Yes, and his name is Caesar!”

For the normal peasant living in Galilee or Judea, they believed that God would some day come back to be with them, but at the present time there was little evidence that he was or that he was going to show up anytime soon.  Rather, there was plenty of evidence that God was still angry over their sins, their inability to keep their covenant responsibilities, and their war-like natures.  The pursuit of happiness?  Such a thing never entered their minds.  Who can be concerned with being happy when surviving another day, another week, another year is seen as a major victory.

God is with us?  Us?  Well, I wish, but it doesn’t appear to be so, does it?

It is to these people that the word went out, “God is with you.”  “Blessed are the poor,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the Kingdom of God.

It takes faith to be poor and believe that God is with you.  Like I said, the people who need the most to hear the news that God is with them are the people who have the least reason to believe that he is.  The young Indonesian girl who has been kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery, where she services a dozen men a day, every day—think she believes that God is with her?  If she believes anything at all she must believe that she somehow angered God and he has abandoned her.

The African mother who watches helplessly as her young child dies of a disease contracted because the only water available is full of impurities—she needs to hear that God is with her, but what kind of faith will it take for her to actually believe it?

And what about the child living in Frederick County amidst people who live comfortable middle-class lifestyles, yet he sleeps in his car with the rest of his family because dad lost his job and mom works a minimum wage job?  What is he to believe?

The Christian life is an incarnational life—we are the Body of Christ.  If people in situations like I’ve just described are going to actually believe that God is with them, it’s going to be because we are with them.  It’s going to be because we don’t look past them like they don’t exist or, even worse, like they are an embarrassment.  It’s going to be because we refuse to make snide comments about them needing to learn to speak English (as if they don’t want to or refuse to, even though they will earn more money if they do).  It’s going to be because we don’t blame them (or their government) for their poverty.

 The Kingdom of God is the place where it’s easy to believe that God is with us.  That’s God’s vision for the earth—that no person live in such a way that being told that God is with them is a cruel joke.  That instead it’s just accepted truth.

Hey, Look, It's a Guitar Post!

Yeah, made some progress last weekend.  As you recall, I had to make both a new neck and a new fretboard.  All that's been done, and the inlay has been done in the headstock, so I'm now back at the point I was two months ago when I realized I had screwed up.

The next task was to install the binding on the headstock. I first had to rout the channel, which I did using the router table and a rabbet bit with the proper bearing. Here's the set-up, and the headstock after the rabbet has been cut:

All's well, except I noticed that a tiny piece had been chipped out of the left corner, so that needed to be fixed.  First I actually enlarged the chip-out so that it could it would be easier to glue in a matching piece of ebony:

I cut a sliver from a spare piece of headstock, and super-glued it in place:

I then just had to trim and sand it, and the patch is pretty much invisible.  

After glueing the black/white purflings to the rosewood bindings, I mitered the top corners of the side bindings:

Then fitted the top piece after mitering the corners to fit perfectly, then glued it all together:

For the section of the headstock where it narrows toward the nut,  I was planning on mitering two more separate pieces but I found that the ends of the side piece were somewhat flexible, so I heated the binding using a regular steam iron (sans steam) and was able to bend this small section and glue them in place.

An overnight dry, and here's what it looks like after the bindings have been scraped and sanded flush:

I'm pretty pleased with how this came out.  I like the white line separating the ebony and the rosewood, and the subtle contrast between the black and the brown.  This scheme is continued down the fretboard, and I think will really look sharp.

Next up: installing the truss rod, then gluing on the fretboard.  After that, it's installing the frets, final shaping of the neck and heel, and then prep work for the finish.

A Little Longer Christmas

The other day I mentioned to Pam that it seemed that the Christmas season had expanded to pretty much begin right after Halloween, and she said that, especially with the economy being down, people couldn’t afford to wait until December to buy Christmas presents but had to spread their purchases out over a longer period of time.  This year there may be more reluctance to use credit cards for buying presents, and by starting in early November, people have four paychecks to use for their purchases.

That makes a lot of sense.  It’s not unusual for me to pick up a present or two for Pam as early as the summer.  (The main disadvantage of which is not so much figuring out where to hide them for six months as it is remembering where I hid them six months later.)  But I have nothing on Pam.  She will use the after-Christmas sales as an opportunity to buy deeply-discounted gifts for the next Christmas.  And she shops all year long, looking for that perfect gift at the perfect price.  She doesn’t have to hide these, either, for most of them are for family members who don’t live with us.  I have been known, however, to get a Christmas gift that she had forgotten about only to discover during spring cleaning.  Which is actually kind of fun.  The point is, we have to spread Christmas out over a longer period of time, and not just for financial reasons.  I don’t know how it is for people who are not in full-time ministry, but for those of us who are, December is a blur.  We spend significant time and energy planning and conducting special worship experiences and Christmas programs, and have numerous social obligations that we have to fit in as well.  By the time the last Christmas Eve service is over, we are all somewhere between bone-tired and completely exhausted.  It’s not good form to fall asleep at your mother-in-law’s Christmas dinner, but it’s hard to avoid.  So to avoid having the Christmas season be something we can’t wait to be over and to be able to actually enjoy ourselves, we have to spread the celebration out over a longer period of time.

Good.

The very heart of Christmas was never intended to be for one month out of the year.  Christmas is about the incarnation of God—his enfleshment on earth.  Not just his presence—if you believe in the theological category of omnipresence, you believe that God is always present, has always been present, can’t be anything other than always-present.  “Immanuel” or literally “God is with us” isn’t about his omnipresence but about his being with us in flesh.  God in a bod.

Christianity has been over-influenced by Platonism and under-influenced by biblical theology regarding the body and the soul.  Platonism split the two, regarding the body—and anything earthly—as the lesser, reflected light of the soul, which was, if not heavenly, at least non-earthly, and therefore unhindered by the limitations of flesh.  Ancient Israelite theology—which is what biblical theology is—did not separate the two so neatly.  The soul was seen as the complete, whole person—which included the body.  And a body was flesh.  The afterlife wasn’t some bodiless existence, it was just with a different kind of body.  Those that believed in resurrection believed in the resurrection of the body, not merely the continuation of a person’s soul. 

The incarnation of Christ is a continual reality.  It may have begun with Mary giving birth in Bethlehem but it did not end with Jesus’ death or with his ascension.  When Paul said that we are the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27; Ephesians 4:12) he wasn’t just using a metaphor like any other metaphor to describe the church.  He really meant it—we are now his body, his flesh.  Our hands are his hands, our feet his feet.  We are to go where Jesus would go, do what Jesus would do, say what Jesus would say—or, better yet, we are to go where Jesus went, do what Jesus did, and say what Jesus said.  We are to go to the broken places in our world, go to the broken, hurting, and oppressed people and be Christ to them.  And to those who are convinced that because of their brokenness, their hurts, their oppression, and their sin that God has given up on them we are to tell and show them that not only has God not given up on them but he loves them completely and accepts them just as they are.  That they are a part of the “us” in the name “God is with us.”

Christmas all year long doesn’t mean that we keep our Christmas trees up longer—it means that we embrace the incarnational mission that Jesus has given all of his followers.

Something You Won't Often See

Me in a robe.

The Falam Baptist Church, a Frederick church of Christians from Burma, held an ordination service in our church last Saturday for their new pastor, San No Thuan (to my left in the picture.)

I agreed to help them set things up and run our soundboard.

Then they asked me to participate in the laying on of hands.

Which means I would have to wear a suit. On a Saturday. If it's Saturday and I'm wearing a suit, there's usually a body or a bride involved. This was serious.

Then they told me they wanted me to wear a robe.

I have to wear a suit and a robe?

I don't wear a robe in worship. Most Baptists don't.

Unless, apparently, you're from Burma.

I'll wear it occasionally when performing a wedding, but try to get out of it whenever I can. I wasn't even sure where my robe was.

It was a nice service, most of which I couldn't understand. But I was presented with a nice, handmade traditional Burmese book bag:

Yeah, I know it looks like a purse or a man-bag.  Trust me, it's a book bag.  It's their version of a briefcase.  And they are hand-made--they even make the material themselves on looms.  They do a lot themselves.  Afterward there was a big meal featuring beef.  Beef from a cow they owned, they slaughtered, they butchered, and they cooked.  Right here in the U.S.A.  What's more American than that?

Most Burmese are Buddhists; only 4% of Burmese people are Christian. These people are serious about their faith, and it did my heart good to join them in this special occasion.

Even if I had to wear a suit and a robe.

Thanksgiving in the Season of Christmas

I met with a friend who is also in ministry and learned that we share a love for the Christmas season.  For those of you that don’t know our routine, each year our family puts up two Christmas trees—an artificial tree with white lights and crystal ornaments that is upstairs in the living room, and a live tree with colored lights and multi-colored ornaments downstairs in the den.  The live tree goes up as soon after Thanksgiving as our favorite tree vendor starts selling them—we are usually one of the first ones on the lot—and by the time we take it down on New Years it is a dry stick of kindling, no matter how much we water it.  The artificial tree goes up around Halloween, and stays up at least until Valentines Day, and sometimes longer.

My friend follows a similar yet different schedule.  His tree goes up as soon as the World Series is over.  Then he and his wife put up a few more around the house, and by Thanksgiving they put six small trees outside, and one on the deck.  After New Year’s Day the trees are put away, except for one four-foot tree which replaces the main tree in the living room by the fireplace.  The decorations for that get changed from month to month, cumulating in April after baseball season starts, when it is decorated with Orioles stuff.

He says that in his house there are two seasons: Christmas season and baseball season.

I’ll come back to him.

I was in a grocery store in late October and there was a section of shelves dedicated to holiday decorations, and I was struck by the fact that there were Halloween decorations, and next to them were Christmas decorations.  I would have thought that maybe there would have been Thanksgiving decorations in between, but no—it was Halloween, then Christmas.

Used to be that Thanksgiving was seen as its own holiday, but then it was like Thanksgiving just became the official kickoff to the Christmas season.  Eat some turkey, and get ready for Black Friday.  Now the Christmas season gets kicked off right after Halloween—or maybe right after the World Series—and then we just blow right through Thanksgiving.  Pam and I were at the mall last weekend, and Santa was already bouncing kids on his knee.  Oh, and we were at the mall to do some Christmas shopping.  The official launch of Water For Christmas was more than a week ago.  The Creative Arts Team has already been working on Christmas decorations for the church, and their work begins in earnest this week, as next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent.

Thanksgiving has become just a momentary blip in the Christmas season.

This is more an observation about our society than one about the church, because Thanksgiving has never really been a religious holiday; it has never been a part of the Christian calendar.  (This season before Advent is called Kingdomtide and actually begins at the end of the Pentecost season in late May.)  The origins of Thanksgiving are as a harvest festival, and was observed at various times until President Lincoln declared it a national holiday and unified its observance.  So it’s not an official church or Christian holiday.

But still.

Back to my friend.  We get together regularly to talk about our spiritual lives and challenge and encourage one another in our walk with Christ.  His focus lately is in wanting to be more thankful about everything, and so beginning fifty days before Thanksgiving he has made a concerted effort to be aware of things in his life for which he needs to be thankful.  In the evening he reflects  on his day and writes in a journal about the things he is thankful for in that day.

So, while on the outside it may appear that he goes straight from baseball season to the Christmas season, in reality he is consciously working to develop a real spirit of thanksgiving in his soul. 

And that is more than just a blip in the Christmas season.

Rather than seeing Thanksgiving as a kickoff to Christmas or just a momentary interruption in the preparation for Christmas, maybe we ought to view the Christmas season as an opportunity to develop a spirit of thanksgiving in our souls.  To reflect on the people, the events, and the circumstances that are in our lives for which we can be thankful.  To learn to be content with who we are, with who others are, with where we are in life, and with what we have.  To be less materialistic and more aware that, unlike a lot of people in our world, we don’t have to worry about literally surviving another week or even another day.  And that we can do something for those who do.