One morning I was cooking some eggs for breakfast. I grabbed my wooden spatula from the canister next to my stove so I could flip the eggs. Ouch! A jagged piece of the wooden handle unexpectedly gave me a granddaddy of a sliver. After breakfast I put the just washed spatula aside so that the jagged edge could be sanded down. Utensils aren’t allowed to bite back in my household and I needed to fix the problem.

This incident got me thinking about how sometimes God needs to sand down our spiritual, emotional and mental jagged edges. Sometimes He does this through trials. As anyone who has accidentally caught some skin while sandpapering knows, this can hurt. But trials are ultimately for our benefit as Paul pointed out when he wrote, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11, New International Version). The key is to allow the trials to remove things in our lives that make us less usable tools in God’s hands.  

Sometimes God sands us down through interactions with other people in conversations or by learning what to do or not to do by their examples. A proverb speaks to this directly: “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friends” (Proverbs 27:17). We should be helping each other gently smooth out any rough edges, exercising wisdom and kindness as we do so. Any roughness in our characters not only hurts God, but those around us, including those we love.

Similarly, through Bible study, meditation, prayer and fasting, we can smooth out the rough edges in our own lives. This is the ideal way to learn and grow since it involves the least amount of pain. If we don’t seek to learn this way, God will find a way to finish the work He has started in us (Philippians 1:6) in a more painful way. After all, He doesn’t want to have to say this about us: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for me…” (Hosea 4:6). A useless tool that cannot be fixed should and will be thrown away.

So what’s the ultimate result if we yield to these methods of smoothing down the rough edges in our lives? We become the perfect tools that God wants us to become. We are fully usable for the purpose He has uniquely designed for each of us. So the next time it feels like God is sandpapering my life in some way, I’ll hopefully think back to this incident and remember that He’s doing it for my own good. God doesn’t let His spiritual tools bite back either.