Tent Pegs and Reps

Judges 4

There he laid.  The commander of the Canaanite army slept soundly on the floor of her tent.  He had been terrorizing the Israelites for 20 years.  He had led 900 iron chariots into battle to kill and destroy her people.  So many lives had been lost under his command, and now there he was.  He had come to her house looking for her husband, a man who knew how to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.  Sisera was on the run and needed shelter and rest.

But her husband wasn’t home.

She welcomed him into her home, offered him a safe place to sleep, and covered him with the colorful, but worn rug she had made when she was young.  She even offered him warm milk to help him relax and coax him to sleep.  All this comforting and care had worked its magic.  

Sisera was sound asleep, almost like a little boy taking a nap under his mother’s careful watch.

Now was her chance.

The great Commander of the Canaanite Army, Sisera, was about to be destroyed…… by a simple housewife.

She reached for her tent peg and hammer.  She knew how to do this job well.  This was hardly her first tent peg.  Her whole life had been spent on the move.  Her people were nomadic.  She had put up and taken down this tent hundreds of times.  Accuracy in pounding tent pegs was just one of the many, insignificant skills that she possessed.  And yet, this would be the one confidence she needed to save her people.

Practice Makes Perfect.

Have you ever heard someone say that to you?  Or how about “practice makes better”.  Or maybe “practice makes progress”.

We have a lot of ways in the English language to say that learning to do something well, will take practice.  As a former public educator, I FULLY believe that practice leads to the eventual mastering of any skill you want to possess.

In the classroom I always called it “reps”.  I believe in reps.  In fact, I will take it one step further and say that I believe in “reps with speed”.  It has been my experience that in order to improve at a skill in any marked way, doing that thing over and over until you can do it successfully at lightning speed is EXACTLY how you grow.

I ask you this: What are you good at?  What are some things you are so good at that you could do them “with your eyes closed”?

I could go on and on, but my point is, you are good at some things.  I mean REALLY good at some things.  They may not be things that public schools in America test you on, but I have known a LOT of kids in my career, and every single one of them has been GREAT at many things.

How did it happen?  How did you get so good at playing Fortnite?  Reps.  Reps With Speed.

I will bet you that even if you are great at Fortnite now, you didn’t win the first Battle Royale that you entered.  My guess is that in the first one…. You died in the first few minutes.  Not because you stink at Fortnite.  It was just because you hadn’t done any reps, yet.

God believes in reps, too, you know?  That’s why I am so confident that reps is how you master a skill.  I also believe that God is brilliant enough to build reps into your life and then use that seemingly insignificant skill to change the world.  Do you want to know how I know this?  I know this to be a fact because the Bible is jam packed with people who did incredible things for the Kingdom of God by using their everyday, insignificant skills to defeat the enemy.

Take our girl, Jael, from the Bible story above.  She killed the Commander of the Canaanite Army by driving a tent peg into his cranium while he slept.  Gross, right?!  But it’s totally true!  It really happened. Jael saved the entire Israelite culture by doing the thing she could do so well.  The thing that she could “do in her sleep”, “with her eyes closed”, “with one hand tied behind her back”.

Take a minute to think about how her heart must have raced.  How her breath was stuck in her lungs.  How she was so keenly aware that if Sisera woke up…. he would kill her.  Or that if Sisera wasn’t instantly killed by the first blow…. he would kill her.  Accuracy was the ONLY thing that mattered in that moment.  Perfection would save her life and the lives of all her people.  I would argue that because of reps, that common, insignificant, ordinary housewife pulled off one of the greatest murders in the Bible.

Reps.  Reps with a tent peg is what saved the Israelites  In a moment where it mattered most, Jael worked what she knew.  She had driven tent pegs her whole life, as she and her family moved from one place to another, setting up and tearing down.  She had a lifetime of reps with speed in the category of “Tent Peg Driving”.  So, God used it!  He put that evil commander in her tent and put the tent peg and hammer in her hand, and it changed the course of history.

And let’s not forget the fact that he was sleeping soundly.  She had reps with speed in the department of “Comfort and Care”.  The Bible doesn’t tell us if Jael had children, but it is likely that she, as a woman of that time, had reps in caring for and comforting children.  

So what did she do?  Tucked him in with a warm blankey and gave him some warm milk to drink, and…… BAM!  Tent peg to the brain!

That’s pretty fierce.  But it was necessary, and when that girl’s back was against the wall, she worked what she had.

Want to know some other Bible characters that worked what they had in order to answer the call of God on their lives?

David – Killed lions and bears as a shepherd and then killed Goliath with the very same slingshot he used in the fields.

Eve – Cared for the plants and animals in the garden before birthing children.  Adam named her “mother of all living things” before she ever had a single child of her own.

Moses – Was a shepherd for 40 years. He then shepherded the Israelites through the wilderness and led them to the Promised Land.

Joseph – The one with the coat of many colors ran Pottifer’s House and then ran the show in prison before he ran Egypt as the second in command.

My point is this:  God is training you for something great.  God sees every single part of you and plans to use it ALL to build Heaven on Earth.  God sees the things that you don’t even know exist or that you feel are too small and insignificant to matter, and He even has a plan for those things, too.

Let me give you one more example of a small, insignificant, meaningless life that God used to make a difference.  That example is me.

I spent 25 years teaching English in a few public schools.  Part of teaching English is teaching writing.  Of all the things I taught over the years, writing was my absolute LEAST favorite thing to teach.  Not because it’s a bad thing, but because it is hard to teach.  Kids often struggle with writing, and I didn’t always know how to help them, but I kept teaching writing, even when I didn’t feel like it, because I wanted to be good at my job.

Another part of being a middle school teacher was the hundreds and hundreds of conversations I got to have with kids over the years.  I got to watch them go through real life and have real struggles.  I was given the opportunity to lean in and get to know them and love them.  I was given moment after moment of sitting and listening to them.  I wasn’t trying to do anything except be a good “mom” to whatever kid walked through the door.  But the opportunities were boundless, and I was just trying to be good at my job.

In the meantime, I was spending much of my freetime reading my Bible and journaling.  It wasn’t a “diary” of events in my life, but it was more a way for me to process the things I believed God was saying to me.  My journals were like 25 years of conversations I had with God.  Want to know something stupid?  Every time I would finish the last page of a notebook full of conversations with God, I would burn the notebook!  That’s right, I have burned dozens of notebooks full of my writing over the past quarter of a century.  Why?  Because they were deep and personal and I couldn’t IMAGINE anyone (my kids) finding them after I died and reading them.  Ha!  Silly?  Maybe.  But it’s what I did.  I was just trying to be a good Christian.

So, for two and half decades, I  taught writing, listened to kids, and wrote things in notebooks that I burned.  None of which were important.  None of them.  

I was just doing life.  Just doing the thing that I needed to do to grow, mature, and be good at my job.  Just pounding those tent pegs.  For. Years. And. Years.

If you had asked me two years ago if I wanted to be an author, I would have laughed in your face.  I would have told you that teaching middle school was God’s call on my life.  I would have told you that I didn’t know the first thing about writing a book.  But it turns out, teaching middle school for all those years was just training.  Just reps that built skills in me that God would eventually call forth in my life.

And here I am.  My first book is published and doing well, and my second book is sitting in my Google Drive, half done, and will hopefully be published soon.

How on EARTH did I get here?  By pounding tent pegs.  Day after day.  Doing what seemed insignificant and unimportant.  Doing things that I often didn’t “feel” like doing, but I did anyway.  God put this gift in me WAY before I was born.  He chose to give me this particular set of skills because He had great plans for me.  I didn’t even know it was happening, but when my husband suggested I write a book, I told him that he was crazy.  

The very next day, God spoke to my spirit.  Here is how it went in my mind.

God: Troy’s right, you know.  You need to write the book.

Me: Welp! That’s cute.  But I have no idea how to do that.

God:  You already wrote it.

Me: Uhhhhhh nope!  I can say with complete confidence that I have, in fact, NOT written any books.

God: You’ve written all your books already.  It happened while you taught writing, loved kids, and wrote notebooks full of prayers.  Just take all the work you have done, and put it in a folder in your Google Doc.  I’ll do the rest.

God was right.  I mean…. He’s God.  Of course He’s right.

I spent years pounding tent pegs, killing lions and bears, caring for plants and animals, shepherding in the wilderness.  For years it all felt small and insignificant.  Now I can see that God was making me practice the thing I would need to become who He has called me to become in this season of my life.

How about you?  What small, stupid, seemingly insignificant thing does God have you practicing?  Are you practicing well?  Are you putting in the reps with speed that will build a life you cannot even imagine right now?  What tent pegs are you pounding?

Friend, I don’t have any magic formula for how to know what God is calling you to do.  I don’t have a 5 Step Process for figuring out which skills you possess that will become the very thing you need when the chips are down, and God calls you to action.  I don’t believe God is that simple anyway.

What I do know is that the only way to make sure you are practicing for your future is to do the best you can with every aspect of your life.  Work to chase perfection in all you do.  Notice I didn’t say “be perfect”?  I believe there was only one “perfect” human, and that is Jesus.  However, we are called to be LIKE Jesus.  That means we ACP every moment of every day.  

ACP is a term that my husband uses with his football team.

If you chase perfection, you will never be perfect, but you will get dang close.

That’s all God needs in order to use you.  All he wants is a heart that listens to His voice and does everything He asks with as much care and willingness as they possibly can.

So!  What are you up to today?  Can you make up your mind to do whatever it is with ACP?

I’ll bet you can.  And when you start to make the intentional choice to listen to the voice of God by being best friends with Jesus, and you choose to ACP with all your heart, you won’t believe how your life will change.

And some day, you’ll look back and see how God used all those seemingly insignificant moments in your life to build a Warrior for the Kingdom.