When I was twelve years old my dad taught me to wallpaper. We scooted across the hill from the Hutt Valley into Whitby and spent a few days helping my aunty, who was a solo mum at the time. Dad showed me how to set the plumb line to ensure the wallpaper was hung properly; pattern matching with joins and corners nice and proper. The plumb line ensured we were able to achieve the result intended by the one who designed the wallpaper.
The Plumb Line is Essential
This lesson became most important when, many years later, my wife and I pulled an all-nighter to refresh our hall and lounge with a new look. Again, the plumb line was essential to ensure we completed our wallpapering job to the standard we hoped to achieve.
What Kathy and I discovered in our old homestead in Matangi was the walls of older houses are not always square. And, in this, we learned a valuable lesson. You cannot base your assessment of what is true by the surrounding environment. You have to trust the plumb line, as the plumb line is always true.
You have to trust plumb line, as the plumb line is always true.
The world is not looking so flash at the moment and I propose to you the key reason is we have abandoned the plumb line. The standard for living as prescribed by the Designer has been disregarded. Society has exchanged order for disorder, calm for chaos and peace for a pandemic. When life was meant to be based on an Absolute, the world prefers a relative reality. The evidence says it’s not working. If you stand back and look at society, there are bubbles and creases where there are meant to be none and the corners of our lives are a mess of twisted patterns that look horrible.
“The cause of all our human miseries is a radical moral dislocation, an upset in our relation to God and each other.”
A.W. Tozer
Test My Theory
Test my theory and base your life on the patterns God put in place when He created the world and you in it. Put God to the test and truly submit to His ways — you will not be disappointed, as you may expect. Instead, you will find, as many do, the plumb line set in place by God has always been for our benefit, to ensure we live the life He always desired for us. His plumb line for our lives will give us the best outcome in the end.
Other Plumb Line Lessons
There are many other lessons my dad taught me that week that we might apply to society and our lives as part of it. On deeper inspection, wallpapering becomes a perfectly applicable analogy for our lives: Get rid of the rough lumps, patch the holes, make sure you prepare the wall well, mix the glue properly, don’t rush the measurements, check before cutting, and most importantly, always trust the plumb line, as the plumb line is always true.
This article was originally published in Te Awamutu News, 14 October 2021.