“Hi, Mrs. Turner,” I said. “Would you like me to nail up the soffit on the east side of your house?”
When Yolanda and I and our two young sons, Nathan and Geoffrey, lived in Grover City (before the city saw itself as a Beach), the Turners lived next door. Their house was built in the 1940s, and their soffit (the wooden sheet on the underside of an overhanging roof) that faced us drooped three feet. With Mrs. Turner in her eighties and Mr. Turner an invalid, I figured they might appreciate some help.
They did. After planting my ladder under the Turners’ eave, I hoisted a box of four-inch nails and a hammer. Pressing the sheet up, I drove a nail flush. To my amazement, however, the board bounced back like a pool springboard. Three more nails eased in with identical results. The wood was mush. I tried other places. Nothing solid remained to hold a nail.
Then I spotted it. A knot.
I’d watched knots bend my nails before. Nailers typically avoid knots; the remnant of an original limb is too dense and resilient. Lacking other options, I aimed one nail toward the knot. It held. From then on, I looked for every knot I could find and pierced each one, pinning the soffit securely. The job was finished within fifteen minutes. Yet I’ve thought about the experience since.
Some people are like wooden knots. Actually, they’re knotheads. Knotheads are the chewing gum in the parking lot of life. They’re the eggshells in your omelet, the driver with the stuck right-turn signal, the screaming baby behind you, the snarling dog on the path ahead. They’re as popular as a paper cut, as subtle as an ingrown toenail.
They’re in every church.
Knotheaded members by nature resist change. For them, whatever the past’s problems were they appear rosier than the murky future. Knotheads can be black-or-white guardians. They buck current trends, bark up the same tree, back into a corner. They’re intractable. Inflexible. Stubborn.
Thank God for knotheads.
Now, whenever I think of knotheads, I think of Jesus and His words in Luke 21:33. Of Paul’s obstinacy. Of times of trouble and the infamous Time of Trouble—because, above all, the time of Jacob’s trouble is about being a stubborn knothead, about clinging to our God and braying, “ I will not let you go!” (See Genesis
32.) And whenever those times come—when the pandemic hits and won’t seem to leave—life drives us to our knees or past our knees to our faces, and we’re left clutching for anything palpable and godly and pithy.
I knew Geraldine Nagel as an older friend at SLO Adventist Church who wouldn’t budge on a letter of doctrine. With a voice like a rusty hinge she’d announce, “Righteousness by faith alone!” Gerry’s convictions about carpet color in the fellowship hall ran as deep as her bedrock Adventist beliefs. Though softhearted, she could be as prickly as a sea urchin with an attitude.
Shortly after our family moved to Maryland, a car accident killed Gerry. (Some of you remember this.) Her funeral astounded church members. Over the phone, my friend Peter Nelson told me about it.
“The church was packed. I’ve never seen so many non-Adventists in our church. She must have been in ten community service groups!” Apparently, Gerry Nagel was as knotheaded about serving others as she was about her doctrines.
I’ve had encounters with other knotheads. When my father lay dying, the ravenous cancer having strangled his kidneys, my knotheaded sisters and mother resolutely bathed his excreting skin with a sponge.
When false rumor swirled about me in a rancid fog, a knotheaded colleague called me directly and asked, “Hey, what’s up with this?”
When our second son took all night to be born, a knotheaded friend (Karen Tyner) slept on our couch to babysit our firstborn.
When I broke my femur in a bicycling accident, knotheaded friends pushed me around Union College in a wheelchair that couldn’t negotiate raised door thresholds.
We need to admit it. When the espresso stands crumble, when the stock market crashes, when gas and food are rationed, when global panic rears its head, our feel-good, go-with-the-flow friends will stick like cotton candy in a hurricane.
But we know from the Crucifixion that Christ’s body can hold a nail.
Especially in church, knotheads can be aggravating. Yet when the world completely loses its solid center and we can’t count on anything, the knotheads will be constant and true—there for us—stubborn to the end.
God, help me at the right time, in the right way, to be a knothead.