My favourite toy was meccano – metal meccano. It has meant that I, as an adult, can construct IKEA furniture.
A meccano set was a perfectly packed box of miniature engineering parts, and a coloured glossy book of very desirable models to construct – trucks, racing cars, cranes, moon buggys! Always, you started construction, and discovered several pieces of construction down the line, that you had put in something upside down, or with the wrong length axle – and there was no alternative. You had to unscrew the nuts, loosen the grub screws, until you got to the part in need of replacement.
(See what I mean by IKEA skills)
Later in meccano life it became using the construction skills honed on set models to attach motors scavenged from other toys. Batteries, elastic drive bands, and lo and behold, the creation of machines that could move themselves, on the ground, or even along washing lines.
You learn patience, and that back-tracking from a dead end is not the disaster it always seems at the time to be. And that no matter how good you get, you will always get something wrong. You can live with that.
And you realise, perhaps at a time when you were not expecting it, that you have picked up a whole host of useful skills that, in a new context, are invaluable. You have been prepared for challenges you did not know were coming.
And this time, I don’t mean IKEA furniture!
That’s why my husband is the most patient man I know – he’s a trouble shooter all the time!
When Ikea stuff is put together it can look like your diagram, or even when constructed properly can wobble and move about…. not so when we are built on the solid rock of Christ Jesus, our Lord and Saviour.
It is a continual learning process though and we are never through learning – which makes life very exciting indeed. Think of Eddison and other entrepreneurs who use what the world would call failure as just a means to perfection. Or in Jesus’ terms maturity. All the different parts knit together until we come to the unity of faith and growth the church needs.
We will be known by our fruit – one of which is patience.
I remember my eldest brother having Meccano and he spent hours making things which were then displayed on the windowsill for a while. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together again, and that continued into his adult life. Even when he got something new he could never just use it, he had to take it apart to see how it worked and then re-construct it. Watches and clocks were his favourite things to take apart, but he always managed to get them back together and still working 🙂 He became a Gas Fitter for British Gas, and I suspect he loved the dismantling of boilers and fires, not to mention installing full central heating systems 🙂
I, on the other hand, had things like Post Office Sets, and toy sweet shops, which I played with for hours 🙂 I remember being confined to bed with chicken pox and playing with the Post Office set….using an upturned knitting needle stuck into some plasticine to put bits of paper on, which represented the receipts for parcels as used in the ‘real’ post offices. From these toys I learned to do simple arithmetic, and improv my reading skills, although I didn’t know that at the time 🙂 As you know I worked for the Official Receiver, and before that I worked at Companies House, both of which involved reading and working with maths amongst other things, so maybe my little Post Office and sweet shop toys were the basis for my future. Who would have thought, when I was about 6 years old, that my future career would come from such small beginnings. Not me that’s for sure 🙂 xx