Bathroom doors and drawing boards

John Paul Carter, Democrat Columnist

For an only child, cousins are very important — like brothers and sisters you sometimes wish you had. Spencer has been one of those special cousins to me. His parents, Aunt Sue and Uncle Colon, lived in the country near Itasca. Every summer I spent several weeks with them — a great treat for a city boy. We had some great adventures together!

Later, Spencer went to the University of Oklahoma on a track and field scholarship and intended to study music. However, because of his math and drawing expertise, he enrolled in the university’s architecture program. After graduation, he moved to Dallas where his first project was the Fairmont Hotel.

Spencer and his wife, Braiden, now live in Seattle, where he recently retired after a distinguished career designing world-class resorts and new town developments all over the globe.

His colleagues recall after a long day of client meetings, Spencer would often return to his hotel room, assemble his “custom toolkit,” sketch late into the night, and emerge the next morning with drawings that often astounded his clients.

His “toolkit” consisted of a hotel room with two queen-sized beds, a screwdriver and a bathroom door. Spencer used the screwdriver to remove the bathroom door, balanced the door between the beds, applied the drawing paper to the door, and then commenced to transform his ideas into drawings for the next day’s presentation.

My cousin’s success as an architect has been greatly enhanced by his ability to “make do” with what he had at hand. I think I admire Spencer as much for his “toolkit” as for the buildings he’s designed.

Too many times when a job needs to be done, I sit around complaining about what I don’t have, rather than looking for ways to use what I do have to get it done. More often than not there’s a suggestion, some bailing wire, a scrap of wood, a spare bolt or a bathroom door that just might work!

Faith often requires us to “make do” or to create a “toolkit.” When Moses complained he didn’t have the right stuff to free the Israelites from their Egyptian slavery, the voice from the burning bush asked, “What is that in your hand?” It was only a shepherd’s staff, but when Moses used it as God commanded, it became a tool of liberation.

God’s call to us isn’t about what we don’t have, but about what we do have. And what we do have includes our strengths and our weaknesses, our assets and our limitations. Like Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” God’s strength can be made perfect in our weakness.

The Lord never asks us to do something without supplying the tools necessary to accomplish our mission. They may not always be the tools we wish we had, but with God’s help, they will be enough.

Lord, open our eyes that we might see drawing boards in bathroom doors. Amen.

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John Paul Carter’s “Notes from the Journey” appear in the Democrat’s Religion page on the second and fourth Fridays of each month. Carter, an ordained minister who attends Central Christian Church, may be contacted by writing him at 107 Bent Oak Road, Weatherford, 76086.