I’m vacationing with my family at our cabin in the Blue Mountains in Oregon State for a few days. My son and I have been splitting wood for burning in the woodstove this winter.

Operating an axe is not one of my better talents, but I’ve learned a spiritual lesson wrangling with logs that don’t split easily.

Don’t give up!

If you’ve never chopped wood and you revel in the thrill of decisive accomplishment, get yourself an axe and some firewood to split. It’s quite a high to deftly swing the sharpened steel into the end of a chunk of tree trunk penetrating the airspace with a loud “crack” and successfully slicing to the bottom of the timber watching wood topple in either direction.

Cracking the wood in one or two blows is ideal. But all chunks of wood are not so easy to split. At times, I could swing and swing and swing and the wood still wouldn’t split. So I learned to use the wedge—a triangular iron with a sharp edge designed to be inserted into a crack made in the log by the axe. Once inserted, I would hammer on the wedge to force it into the log and push the wood apart until the piece capitulated and split in two. The process seemed slow, but victory was always assured. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” the old Proverb reminds us.

I thought about the parallels of using a wedge in splitting wood to relying upon prayer for spiritual healing. Sometimes problems don’t yield as quickly as we’d like. It seems that we pray and pray but still no progress. But like the strategically placed wedge, we have spiritual tools we can use to split the case wide open and prevail with success.

Persistence, perseverance, wisdom, and insightfulness are the “wedges” of faith that complete the work. They don’t give in to tough appearances, lack of response or intimidation. They prevail with the omnipotence of Mind that always triumphs.

It took several whacks on the wedge to split some pieces of wood, but they always gave way. The wedge prevailed. Truth prevails too.

Don’t give up when you pray. Every affirmation of Truth and every new understanding of Spirit you gain drives you closer to your final destination. Truth wedges error out of your experience, completes the task at hand, and brings the needed healing.