I have a piece of walnut in the vise and a ¾” mortising chisel in my hands. I’m hammering away the chips, digging further into the wood with each pass. The work is tedious, but the process is satisfying.

It is also agonizing because I am, at best, an average woodworker. The stuff I make is seldom perfect. I make a lot of mistakes. I can always count on several “do-overs” in my attempts to build things.

The way I look at it, setbacks are a part of life no matter how good you are. No matter how often you’ve done something, there will come a time when you’ll goof up at the simplest task.

The other day I needed to cut a notch out of the edge of a board. I measured twice and double checked my lines several times. My markings were perfect. But when I laid the piece on the saw table, I cut the notch on the wrong side of my line.

I could quit, I suppose. Or I could keep trying.

One unforeseen benefit of this hobby of mine is that it has demanded a level of patience out of me that I did not possess as a younger man. The blunders don’t get to me like they used to. Most of the mistakes are not the fault of the wood. In fact, they are most always the result of my lack of skills or lack of attention to detail.

I could quit, but I keep going back.

As I wipe away the shavings on my workpiece, I can’t help but think of how my life is a lot like this tenuous hobby of mine. Sometimes rewarding. Sometimes fragile. I have cut on the wrong side of the line many times, no matter how hard I try to get it right. Often my life has not gone the way I envisioned it would go.

Marion and I were riding along in her truck last Saturday, both aware that the day before had been the 4th anniversary of Beth’s death. One of the things I appreciate about our relationship is that we both have a deep respect for our first spouses. We are not afraid to talk about them because we know they matter.

In the course of the conversation she said to me, “Think about how much your life has changed in the last four years.”

She wasn’t kidding. When I lost Beth, everything changed. I never had a reason to imagine a life without her.

At first, I just survived the loneliness. The silence of the house. The missing seat at the table. The cold pillow next to me at night. Whatever plans we had, those evaporated into thin air. The laughter we shared ceased. Our story together just ended.

Buried inside all that grief, there might have been reason to quit. Reason to throw in the towel. Or, at least, reason enough to live alone the remainder of my years in an attempt to honor her memory.

I think I could have been content with that. I was getting to the point where I had accepted that being on my own might just be my appointment in life. A lot of people I admire are walking that very path.

But then, the sun came up one day, and my story with Marion began.

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but I could never have imagined my life with her.

There’s no way I could have planned the circumstances that brought us together. It is exactly like an Unseen Hand has put all the pieces in just the right places. And by that, I’m not saying that the pieces of my life before were wrong. It’s just that my life now is so completely different than I thought it would be after losing Beth.

The love that Beth and I had for one another will never be repeated. It cannot be replaced. It will always live on in my memory for the gift that it was to me.

But I have embraced a new love. As a result, my life has taken so many unexpected turns. I have my kids and grandkids whom I love without reserve, and now, all of a sudden, I also have new sons and daughters and grandchildren to love in the same way. My dad and I shopped the salvage stores a lot back in the day, and now, with Marion, I have rediscovered my love for junk.

So, yup, a lot has changed in the last four years.

I don’t know whether to call it the new me or the old me rediscovered, but I’ll take it all as the gift that only Grace can offer. Life is short. It challenges me more than I am capable of understanding. And, though I should have the experience to know exactly what I’m doing, the truth is that I’m making up the plan as I go along.

I don’t know any other way to build a table or to live my life. I haven’t done everything in this transition perfectly. I know there are some things I probably could have done better. I suppose I could have paid more attention to the details and avoided some of my blunders. But I don’t know any other kind of life.

One of my downfalls as a woodworker is that I’m prone to point out my mistakes. I’ll finish a piece. Someone will offer a kind word or two about it. I’ll thank them and then proceed to point out that wonky joint in the back that didn’t go together just right. Or that flaw in the finish where I failed to get all the glue cleaned up like I should have.

This is the same tendency that makes a fella look for flaws in other people’s work, too. It’ll make him question why another guy used a particular kind of bracing on that table leg. “I wouldn’t have done it that way,” he says to himself.

Well, I’m not going to tell you about all the imperfections in my life. Neither am I going to criticize the way another man handles the same kind of changes I’ve gone through. There’s a million ways to build a bookcase. I reckon there’s more than one way to lose and love again.

All I know is, if I trust the One who got me here, my life is exactly where it’s supposed to be. In the great scheme of things, I got a do-over. I’m chiseling away at the edges. I’m making the joints as solid as I know how. I’m not sure what the finished piece will look like, but I’m certain, in spite of the flaws, it will be perfect.

She’ll ask me from time to time, “Are you sure you’re not tired of me yet?”

It does take some effort, holding a marriage together from two different homes 70 miles apart. It’s not the normal way of building a matrimonial relationship. Someone else might do it differently.

But, no, I’m not tired. I’m not about to quit.

Besides, I want to see how this turns out.