Be sure to read the brief addendum. The timing – and the irony – was perfect.

I recently bought a hand-held shower head and hose from a big box home improvement store. The shower head and five-foot PVC hose were embalmed in an impossibly small package. I worked hard to extricate the goods without destroying the packaging, just in case I was dissatisfied and wanted to return it.

But it worked fine, though the hose was stiff and wanted to spray at a 30-degree angle, which meant the shower wall got more water than I did. I assumed it would relax after a day or two out of the package, but I was mistaken. I tried warming the hose, hanging the hose, wedging the hose, but it kept returning to its 30-degree angle for weeks.

Once, while in the shower, I tried to physically manipulate the hose at its trough, unknowingly twisted the shower head, and shot the spray over the shower curtain and doused the whole bathroom. In the two months that have followed, the hose has slowly bent to my will, but it clearly had a way about it that was not my way.

People are like that too. They have a way about them. What begins as a propensity in childhood is bent into a way of life after years of confinement in the small package of adulthood.

I have a friend who applied for a position in the CIA when we were both still in our thirties. The CIA turned him down because he had already reached their cut-off age for new hires (though they encouraged one of their contractors to hire him and employ him at Langley). They did not want to take on the challenge of unbending someone who had reached the advanced age of 34 and was already stuck in his ways.

People are like my shower hose: they have a way about them. That way is deeply engrained and usually bent. The problem is that we don’t know that we are bent. We think that we are the norm, the standard for what is right and good.

But the prophet Isaiah told us long ago that God’s ways are not our ways. We assume that we are the straightedge that determines morality, even though we have been twisted by sin and sorrow and hardened by routine. We imagine ourselves the measuring stick for what is normal. We are mistaken.

Christians believe that God is the standard of what is right and good—God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. But how can we measure up to that? Jesus oriented his life around God. He put others’ needs before his own. He refused to pay back evil for evil. He spoke truthfully and eschewed manipulative and deceptive speech.  He poured out his life to help others.

If Jesus is the straightedge of normality, we are all crooked. We are “curved in on ourselves,” as Augustine of Hippo, one of history’s greatest thinkers, described us. And that curve has hardened. Can we ever be straightened out?

It is possible. Augustine himself had been bent in the wrong direction, but he was significantly straightened out. Millions of others have been too. But for a human to be reshaped, especially one who has been tightly restrained by sin and selfishness for a long time, is no easy thing. Straightening a stubborn shower hose is a cinch compared to straightening people who long have been coiled around themselves.

For one thing, people need to see and admit that they are bent. Biblical writers call this “repentance.” Until we see the problem, there is little hope that we will be straightened out.

It took many gallons of hot water, running through the shower hose for months before it was pliable enough to be straightened out. There is something that corresponds to this in Christian spiritual formation. People need a new Spirit within to soften them and make them supple.

They also need to develop new habits. Spiritual disciplines like giving, worshiping, serving, silence, and many others are tools the patient Divine Helper uses to bend us back into shape. That shape, not surprisingly, resembles Jesus, and makes us useful to others and a joy to ourselves.

Addendum

After I finished this article, and before my wife proofed it, I went to the basement and into the aptly named crawl space in search of a shut-off valve to an outside spigot. We are new to an old house, and I hadn’t been in the crawl space before. I searched in vain for a shut-off valve, got dirty in the process, and took a shower afterward while my wife proofed the article.

The shower head, which has been well-behaved for more than a week, immediately bent back to its old, familiar 30-degree angle and sprayed the shower wall. When I readjusted it, it turned stubbornly back. If I may put it this way, I have a backsliding showerhead.

It’s a lot like us. Even after we have begun to change, we can fall back into our old ways. How we need a patient Divine Helper to straighten us out!