I Can’t Swing the Hammer for You

I’m a Christian, a follower of Christ. I believe in God and I’m always running into people who ask me to prove that God exists. They call themselves atheists.

But it isn’t my burden to prove to them that God exists… because that’s impossible. If they want proof that God exists, they must prove it to themselves. Unfortunately, all that most of them are looking for is reassurance that they are right about His absence.

Recently I was involved in, let’s say, an altercation with an atheist. Her contention was that if I wanted her to believe in God I needed to prove to her that He was real.

She didn’t like my answer.

My answer was, “I can’t swing the hammer for you.”

“What does that mean?” She shot back. 

I don’t know why atheists are always angry. 

She didn’t know the story behind the statement but I’m going to let you in on it.

I like to do a little blacksmithing here and there. Nothing major. Just wall hooks and hinges. Occasionally I’ll do something like a table or an ornamental fire screen or a tangle of vines climbing over a set of kitchen cabinets… you know… little stuff.

I’ve been blacksmithing, as a hobby, and sporadically for commissions for about 38 years. I’ve swung the hammer many times in that span, bent a lot of steel, and learned how to persuade the metal to move where my imagination wants it to go. The skill has been hard won and I am proud of the prowess that I’ve developed over time.

Many young men have come by over the years and asked if I could teach them how to do what I do, and my answer has always been yes, but I don’t believe that I have ever actually taught any of them to do what I can do with a hammer. 

They want to be creators and skilled craftsmen but all of them lack the simplest ingredient. They don’t have the will to be failures first. They expect to be able to watch a video or listen to an explanation and then be able to do it, first try, no failures. They’re looking for shortcuts. 

They usually come to the forge with a primitive knife or hook that they’ve made in some forge somewhere that looks very similar to the first knives and hooks that I made. 

I tell them, “That’s great! Now go make a million more.”

“What?” is the usual reply. “Can’t you teach me?”

And they never like the answer, “Looks like you already know how to make a knife. Now practice making it better til it looks like the picture you have in your head. It’s as simple as that. You have to swing the hammer.”

You can’t become a master without being a novice for a long time and the master will tell you, if you ask him, that he is not a master. He is trying to become the Master. He swings his hammer and listens to what the Master whispers to him. He forges on through trial and error and failure after failure doing his best to become even a fraction as good as the true Master Craftsman, God. He’ll tell you that every new project teaches him something. He must fail over and over again until he finds the secret combination of force and faith that allows the vision in his mind to become something tangible and real. 

Every day the master becomes a novice again. He knows how to fail gracefully.

The teacher has swung the hammer and he knows that he must keep swinging it every day until he dies.

The student has not.

When my atheist friend challenged me to “prove” the existence of God she thought that she had swung the hammer of faith and learned that there is no God. She doesn’t realize that if she looks for Him and wants Him in her life He will be there… but SHE has to be the one to swing the hammer.