Once You Get The Hang Of It

This story has been around awhile, but bears repeating. Satan was auctioning off some of his tools. Among them were hatred, jealousy, envy, laziness, pride, arrogance, greed, lust, and violence. He raked in premium prices from buyers eager to use the tools in dealing with other people.

However, a sign on one tool read, “Not for sale.” Someone in the crowd asked Satan why he wouldn’t accept bids on it. “It is my chief tool — discouragement,” he said. “No tool works better for prying open human hearts, and when I use it to get in, I can do just about anything I want to with that heart.” Even though my boyhood mentor, Jaybird, was a God-fearing, God-serving man, he sometimes used the devil’s chief tool as part of a teaching technique that never failed to work because it left lessons indelibly imprinted in my mind.

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One technique involved saying confusing things and not explaining them, causing me to rack my brain, become discouraged, and give up. I’d beg him to explain. In time, he would, but only after he knew the solution I wanted so badly to obtain would become a permanent part of the guidelines for life he was instilling in me. Once when we were fishing, I asked him if he was afraid of dying. “Ain’t nothing to dying … once you get the hang of it,” he answered. “Jaybird, that’s stupid,” I said. “How can you get the hang of something you only do one time?” “Ain’t nothing to dying … once you get the hang of it,” he mumbled again. Whereas Satan uses discouragement for destructive purposes, Jaybird used it constructively; whereas Satan uses discouragement to foil a person’s desire to be successful in his own eyes and in the eyes of family and friends, Jaybird used it — not to implement hopelessness and surrender, as Satan does — but as an impetus to strive even harder to attain worthy goals and, most importantly, to be successful in the eyes of God. As a college teacher, I sometimes utilize a “can’t do” ruse to generate a “can do” mentality among students. I’m certain Jaybird would approve. The strategy involves throwing out a dare in such a way that students rise to the challenge; then I orchestrate their efforts to solve the challenge. If I’m successful, in some small way I’ve taught them that they must never let discouragement be a deterrent to overcoming difficulties encountered on the road to achievement. Life is an interminable problem-solving process in which discouragement must be overcome constantly. The more it is overcome, the less of an impediment it becomes. Experience in defeating the devil’s chief tool leads to losses for him and victories for humankind. Eventually, I overcame Jaybird’s dose of discouragement and solved his riddle. Like all lessons the beloved old black man taught me, that one is still as useful as ever. Here’s what Jaybird was really saying: “Ain’t nothing to living … once you get the hang of it.”