Finally, all of you should be of one mind. Sympathize with
each other. Love each other as brothers and sisters. Be tenderhearted, and
keep a humble attitude. 1 Peter 3:8 NLT
I watched
as they clung to my pants’ legs.
I never
knew what I might run into when hunting in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—or just
traipsing through fields exploring new lands. My grandfather had plenty of
farmland and woods for my cousin and me to explore. But as young boys living in
a time when backyards were large and parents didn’t have to worry as much about
our safety—we were more likely to get into trouble ourselves than we were to
have someone kidnap us—our grandfather’s land wasn’t enough. We wanted more. So
we ambled across his land and onto neighbors’ lands. It didn’t matter. We might
not have known the property owner, but they knew we were the grandsons of
“Dan’l Martin.” That made walking across their land—and even hunting on
it—permissible.
Beggar
lice—or begga lice as we called it—was one thing that liked to cling to our
clothes. If we came home with it, my grandmother insisted we pull it from our
pants before we entered her house. Doing so wasn’t such a big deal, just time
consuming. It stuck to clothes as if somebody had superglued it. And when I
thought I had gotten it all, I’d see some more. As soon as we were lice-free,
we could enter—usually to a good home-cooked meal she had slaved over the oven
to cook. Rice, butter beans (with a ton of pot liquor, as she called it), fried
chicken, pan gravy, and ears of fresh corn.
But
another culprit often attacked my cousin and me as we scampered through the
woods and fields. This one wasn’t as friendly as beggar lice. We called it cuka
burs. The proper name is cocklebur. We often didn’t know we had accumulated
them until we rubbed our hands on our pants for some reason or until our pants
suddenly felt tight around the leg area. If we rubbed without looking first,
we’d immediately recognize the culprit. Sharp pricks pricked our fingers.
Removing them without contracting bleeding fingers proved difficult. Sometimes,
we’d wait until we got back to our grandparents’ house, where we’d find a pair
of gloves or perhaps use a pair of pliers. Like beggar lice, cockleburs stuck
like glue.
Much later
in my life, another item was often used in place of glue: Velcro. I didn’t know
its origin until years later when I taught grammar to my eighth graders, and we
worked through an exercise picking out adjectives in sentences. There, I came
across the story of Velcro’s beginnings. The story sparked my interest because
it mentioned cockle burrs, which immediately took me back to my childhood.
George de
Mestral, a Swiss engineer, while hunting in the Jura Mountains in Switzerland
in the 1940s, discovered that cockle burrs had decorated his pants and his
dog’s fur. He wondered how these tiny things attached so well to him and his
feline friend. When he returned, he observed the cocklebur under a microscope
and noticed a hook and loop design. With the help of friends in the weaving
business, De Mestral duplicated the hook and loop of the cocklebur and began
manufacturing what we now know as Velcro. The word comes from the French words
for velvet (velour) and hook (crochet).
Peter
encouraged first-century believers to be of one mind—to hook and loop. Still
good advice. His directive didn’t’ mean then—nor does it now—that they had to
agree on everything. But they needed to work together. Join hands, arms, feet,
and spirits.
One hook
and loop serve little, if any, purpose. Yet, a half- or one-inch square of
Velcro shows the power of unity—hooks and loops working together to hold
together the strongest of things.
Such is
the power of unity when God’s people unite. We have different personalities and
share various interpretations about some things in the Bible, but our common
ground of belief in Jesus as the way of salvation and our mandate to share his
love with others is stronger than the minuscule things separating us. We are
many hooks and loops with unmeasured power.
The
Coronavirus pandemic demonstrated what can happen when people and industries
come together to fight a common unseen enemy. Our spiritual enemy is no
different. He roams about like a roaring lion seeking to kill, steal, and
destroy. But the power of God’s love, when hooked and looped together among his
people, will overcome our enemy’s worse tirades.
Strive for
unity with others, and be amazed by what God can do through you.
Father,
give me a spirit of unity so my work for you might be effective to the
uttermost degree.
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