THREE NAILS AND A KNIFE

It was on my desk when I came back from lunch.

And its raw power startled me.

Hours of careful, yet rustic carving had created a twelve inch high rugged cross on a pedestal. Bold knife strokes had shaped a visible memory of the place where it happened--where Savior Jesus' Blood bought salvation.

Scarlet stains soaked the wood where three nails had scarred the Immaculate and opened Redemptions arteries. Red blotches splattered on the rocks at the foot of the cross, and a stream of crimson stains showed where the blood had flowed off the mount.

On the base a small brass engraving tells the observer, "The Children Win."

"Dutch" had carved it--with the very knife he had used to carve his way through the "green hell" of the Vietnam War.

Notches on its handle marked the lives this knife had ended. Markers of pain and spilled blood. Still-bleeding wounds tormented Dutch's own mind as he remembered the faces of the ones he had killed.

His mind vivid with scenes of death in blood-drenched places, Dutch once again took up the knife. But this time it was to carve a cross--another place of another kind of Blood.

Not the blood of war and death, but life-giving Blood. Cleansing Blood. Healing Blood.

Every stroke, every cut into the wood shaped the form of the cross. Every time the blade hit the wood it whittled away more of the chains of memory that had locked him in torment.

Then, one by one, he picked up the three tiny nails and hammered them into the cross--just like the spikes that nailed his own sins and agonies to Calvary's cross.

His agony-notched knife laid at the foot of that cross on my desk for years--always reminding me that when Jesus, still pinioned by those nails, declared forgiveness it included Dutch, the ones he hurt, and the ones that hurt him.

It included you and me.