A levelheaded decision

I came home yesterday and my husband was on a mission hanging pictures. He had retrieved his mothballed paintings from the attic and was filling all available wall real estate in the bedrooms with nouveau impressionism. I looked around at the new art gallery and at one point walked across the room and straightened a frame ever so slightly to satisfy my eye. My husband said, “I used a level, so it’s pretty straight.”

A level, in case someone doesn’t know, is a carpenter’s tool that looks like a ruler with a little window in the center containing a bubble. Two vertical markers on the glass tube are your guidelines. You will know that the edifice you are constructing—or the picture you are hanging—is on a horizontal plane if you put a level to it and the bubble is seen poised between the two lines.

There’s no arguing with the level. I could have sworn that the picture needed adjusting, but the level says it is my eyes that are off, not my husband’s measurements. This is challenging to me because I like to go by my eyes. I like to trust my eyes. I immediately made the obvious spiritual application—that there is a tendency in us to prefer our own assessments and the sight of our own eyes to the plumb line of the Word of God. We are in many places warned against this temptation:

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).

But the plot thickens. In my cursory research on the subject, I found there is a difference between “level” and “plumb.” Level is straight from side to side, whereas plumb is straight up and down—that is, horizontal versus vertical. If something is not level, a marble placed on it will roll off; if something is not plumb it will tilt, like the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa tilts.

But what, I wondered, if the room dimensions themselves are not square? It happens. This is a contractor’s nightmare, and the difference always has to be rectified (or fudged) in some way. Does the carpenter’s level orient to the dimensions of the crooked room? Or does it orient to the center of the earth’s core, aka gravity? If the former, then by getting the picture perfectly in synch with my floor and ceiling lines, I am thumbing my nose at true and honest levelness for the sake of agreement among the various components of my room. If I am, on the other hand, a stickler for true and absolute levelness when it comes to hanging my painting, the painting will be the only true thing in the room, and will look like an argument with all the other elements of the décor.

I think when it comes to framed paintings I will opt for the slight dishonesty of aligning them to crooked room dimensions. But the Christian life is another matter. In that case, my desire will be to follow the Scriptures unswervingly no matter where they take me, rather than to fudge a bit on what I see therein in order to fall in line with the prevailing fads.