CHAPTER 45
LIFE’S LETHAL PENCILS
We have at one time as children grown up making use of pencils as our first writing tool. However, we discover later on that we could make more permanent prints with the pen or biro a few years into primary or elementary school. Overtime we tend to have given up the use of the pencil to only specific uses like for drawing whether it’s in the arts, construction or engineering thus dignifying the pen or biro as a more important resource. These days of computer aided designs has not helped pencils fare better.
In spite of the downgrading use of pencils, it pokes its head towards human life to share salient points that can influence how we lead our lives.
Pencil marks are temporary and could easily be erased from the paper with an eraser signifying how transient our lives are. Humans live in life as marks that soon enough disappear once their time has evolved and the great master eraser has erased them off the paper called life. When the master decides it’s time to have you cleaned off the surface of the earth, there is hardly anything one can do about it.
To make good use of a pencil, it has to be sharpened. A pencil is not valuable when it is blunt. It finds value under the cutting of the razor. The best in us that makes us valuable to the world around us only arrives after the painful and sometimes long period of life’s cutting. We become valuable only after we have managed to come through this period stronger than before.
Every time a pencil is sharpened and used, it loses its long size to life. This is what we call diminishing effect. It happens that however way we see life, we don’t get younger. We continually diminish till we get off life. We labour every day in life and the effect of our labour results in the effect we see around us. We either increase or decrease all towards the great diminishing that certainly happens.
Pencils can be broken and still find use as a writing tool however small it may become after the breaking. No circumstance in life should diminish our ability to affect life positively the best way that we can. Challenges may come to break us or move us and try to devalue our capacity. Just stay strong to what’s in you already and keep affecting lives positively.
Look through the inside of a pencil, you will find that long and round piece of graphite. The pencil may seem like that round covering of wood however beyond the wood is the value, the piece that makes all the marks. There is something in you that is beyond the shell of what people can see. You are not you because of your face or body structure. You are who you are because of the substance of your heart. If the outside isn’t nice it’s understood. All pencils don’t look nice but they are still useful. Your worth is not in the casing.
Pencils could be thin or fat, big or small, wide or slim; however they find immense value in the hands of the user. You are a valuable tool in the hands of the master. However your size, it doesn’t matter. God still finds you an immense tool to write with in this side of life and he is using you.
Some pencils make thick dark prints while some others make thin light prints. The thick prints don’t easily get erased by eraser while the light ones disappear in one brush of the eraser. What kind of imprints are you making?
Your effects should live prints that will last through the throbbing of time’s sands. We live life as pencils making marks everywhere around life. What matters is what marks we make and how long this marks will stay. Most persons hardly leave any marks because they fail to discover their writing capacity. They thus end up only as a story once told. Some others are busy making positive marks time will never forget. It’s only a matter of choice.
Just remember, you are God’s lethal writing weapon, only but a pencil in the hands of the creator.