Better with Age

I don’t really drink bourbon.

It’s not that I dislike it – I just don’t know a lot about it and can’t appreciate what I’m tasting. So, I’ll sip at whatever I’m offered and occasionally enjoy a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned (mostly if my brother makes one for me).

A couple weeks ago, though, I went to Kentucky with my dad to experience the Bourbon Trail.

We went on a tour of the Maker’s Mark distillery, and it was incredible. If Disney put on a distillery tour, they’d do it like Maker’s Mark. The grounds are beautiful, the buildings pristine, and guides as friendly and knowledgeable as you’ll find anywhere.

Again, I know nothing about bourbon – so I had a lot of questions and our tour guide patiently answered them all.

He mentioned that Maker’s Mark bourbon ages for five or six years – to get it just right.

That got me curious.

I don’t have a particularly refined palette. So, I wondered if I’d be able to tell the difference between a bourbon aged, say, four years, versus five or six when it’s fully matured.

“Oh yes,” he said. “A year makes an extraordinary difference in the quality of the bourbon. Tasting it at four years compared to five years would be an entirely different experience.”

Bourbon has no free will – no power of agency. Yet it manages to get better over time.

I do have free will – I have the power of agency. But I’m not sure I’m getting better over time.

I can’t help but wonder if I’m living the same year over and over again.

I don’t want that.

I want your experience of me today to be different than your experience of me a year from now. I want you to detect stronger notes of grace, to sense more humility, to taste more love and joy and kindness.

I hope you want the same.

Let’s resolve – together – that we’ll be better a year from now than we are today.

Bending Steel

I took a blacksmithing class a couple nights ago.

Tony, our instructor, handed us each a steel rod about eight inches long.

“In the next two hours,” he said, “we are going to turn this shapeless piece of metal into a beautiful piece of art.”

We put our fireproof gloves and safety goggles on and Tony led us to the furnace.

Steel, it turns out, is not all that malleable. It doesn’t bend easily – even under tremendous weight. That’s why they use it to build bridges and skyscrapers.

But, when immersed in a white-hot fire, the steel begins, almost imperceptibly, to soften.

We plunged our rods into the burning coals and waited. Once they were glowing red, we took them to our anvils and began hammering and bending them into something else – something new.

I only had a few seconds to work before the steel cooled and it needed to, once again, return to the fire. It felt like a long time before there was any noticeable progress. But, little by little, it began to change shape.

As I pounded at the stubborn metal, I thought about the stubbornness of my heart. I thought about how unbending I can be. I thought about how, sometimes, the only way for God to mold and shape me is to allow me to be immersed in fire.

By the end, the steel was almost unrecognizable. The old useless gray rod had been worked into a piece of artistic twists and elegant curves.

You can see the finished product here. It is nothing to boast about, but if I – a complete novice – could draw any beauty out of a piece of steel, imagine what God could draw out of a heart of steel.

He doesn’t always soften us by fire. He doesn’t only mold and shape us in midst of the flames.

But, when He does, I don’t want to resist. I want to take the fire when it comes.

I want to be softened.

God, soften me.

The Day After Perfect

So, here we are.

A full week into the New Year.

Studies show that, by this point, a quarter of us have already given up on our resolutions. By February, only one in five will still be standing and, by the end of the year, less than one in ten.

Why are we so bad at keeping the commitments we make to ourselves? Why am I so bad at it?

Well, for any number of reasons, I suppose.

Maybe I set unrealistic goals and quickly get discouraged.

Maybe I didn’t properly prepare and quickly feel lost.

Maybe it’s because of what Jon Acuff calls the “day after perfect.”

The “day after perfect” is the day after you fall short – the day after you cheat on your diet or skip a workout or spend more than your budget allows.

I don’t know about you, but, for me, “day after perfect” is usually the day after I get started. I’m always in that quarter of people who fall a week in.

And, usually, I stay down.

That's because I'm after perfection - not progress.

You'd think I would have learned by now.

When I pursue perfection, I'm inevitably disappointed. I give up and, in the end, make no progress whatever.

The cycle ends now.

Here’s to committing to get back up and keep moving forward the “day after perfect.”

Here’s to thinking differently about how we keep our resolutions.

Here’s to progress.