I’m moving some furniture this week; an old, well-made dresser where the bases of the drawers are sound, solid and strong, and a beautiful piece with lead-light glass in the door. I’m considering whether to keep some weights in the drawers of the dresser, I’ll have to assess their strength properly when I get the dresser home.
We’ve had drawers over the years made with flimsy thin bases stapled into particle board. These drawers collapsed with just clothing inside. They popped off and sagged within months of use. There were gaps where the base had fallen off the sides. The base now scraped on the front of the drawer below as it opened.
There is a significant difference between something made with quality materials and workmanship and something made with particle board and veneers. When you open a drawer, you soon get an idea of how well this dresser was put together.
Old dressers often used dovetailing in the corners. A dovetail joint is stronger than two pieces of wood just butted up against each other and stapled. When a drawer is dovetailed, the wood itself becomes the joint, it is not reliant on an external force. The joint carries integrity.
I came across a reel from Donald Miller this week where he talked about the gap between who we really are and who we present ourselves as. He described the gap as small for healthy people, large for toxic people. All of us have gaps. None of us are perfect.
Social media allows us to magnify our highlights and minimise our lows. We see the carefully curated versions of everyone else and imagine a big gap between us and them. If we’re aware, we know that gap exists. If we take a healthy view, we know that we’re only seeing the best bits of someone else’s world and we don’t allow ourselves to get jealous or down about it.
The strange thing about gaps is that our brain is designed to fill the gap – and I’m not talking about filling silence. If I show you three pictures: a picture of a young dog playing with its owner, the same dog now aged and sitting beside its owner, then the owner sitting alone with his head lowered; your brain is going to fill in the gaps. This series of pictures becomes a story: The young dog grew old and died.
When we meet a normal person, we know there’s a gap. When we get glimpses of that gap, we fill it with a story depending on our perspective: ‘they must be having a bad day’, or ‘they must be upset with me’, or ‘they must need a rest, I won’t bring this up’ or ‘perhaps I’ll give them space this afternoon and try again tomorrow’.
If we’re aware of our perspective and how our brain creates a story, we can check in on the facts. Where we already play a story on repeat, ‘I’m not good enough, nobody likes me’, that’s the story that we’ll come up with the fastest. But if we step back and pause, we can question what’s really going on and frame a new story. Hopefully this story is based on real-life.
As you become more aware, you’ll catch the automatic story creator inside your head quicker. Check in, how accurate is the story you’re telling yourself?
I read a great article this morning about the specifications of the ark from the book of Exodus. It was a box of acacia wood overlaid with gold. Rabbis and scholars still ponder the reasoning for covering the inside of the ark with gold. It seemed superfluous when it was covered by a lid and no one was going to look inside. It wasn’t there for decoration.
Their reasoning is that the gold represented the integrity of the ark. It was the same inside as it was outside. The few people who did get to see inside weren’t disappointed. They witnessed the same beauty on the inside as they saw on the outside. There was no gap.
The gold was a veneer, which makes sense when you realise that they had to carry the ark by hand. Acacia wood is lighter than gold and so it was possible to carry the ark. If it was made of solid gold, it would be too heavy to carry. It wouldn’t have been fit for purpose.
This shows us that veneers themselves are not bad or wrong. Veneers, used in the right places, add beauty when the structure is sound. What matters is the integrity of the item. Is there a gap? Is the veneer covering lack or where something is rotten?
When we meet a toxic person, they seem bright and shiny, and they don’t seem to have a gap. They carefully curate their lives like social media to only show what they want you to see. The issue is that all the filters and editing hide a big gap that you don’t know is there. Their world is a veneer covering a “coarser wood or other material”. The bigger the gap, the coarser the material or the more toxic the person.
Integrity is structurally sound. Where we don’t have integrity, there is something off, something that’s not made well, something that is likely to give out under the usual wear and tear of life.
Buildings that are not structurally sound create safety hazards, they could collapse at any time. It’s not safe to be there. They need to be repaired.
Where a toxic person has a large gap, that’s an integrity issue. The gap needs bracing and repair for the safety of everyone around them. They’re hiding the gap because it requires humility and teachability to fill it, traits that seem unbearable to them.
Where they’re willing to walk the journey of repair, that’s wonderful! Support them in that journey. Just remember that if they were a building, you’d only be allowed in with a hardhat and steel cap boots. There are hazards during the repair process; sometimes there is demolition work involved, sometimes rebuilding. Things are out of place.
When a building is identified as structurally unsound, signs are put up and a wise person is careful in the vicinity.
If you have the opportunity to open the drawer on someone’s life, you’ll soon find out whether the workmanship and materials they’ve built with are quality. You’ll get to see how smoothly the drawer opens or whether it requires careful maneuvering. Are they structurally sound or do you realise that there is a large gap where integrity should live?
There are tell-tale signs. Have they tacked things together with staples or are there strong joins where the very fabric of their being has formed a strong bond? Are things disintegrating at an unreasonable pace? It’s when the pressure comes on that joints are tested and sagging or gaps may appear.
When you see signs of a gap, it is wise to be careful around this person. Don’t jump to conclusions, your story might be skewed. But check it out, watch for evidence and take appropriate precautions.
How precious when pressure reveals strength. There is beauty in integrity.
