Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Scissors have got to be one of the all-time great inventions: simple; efficient; and irreplaceable when they are the one thing you really need.  The earliest version was designed and used by the Egyptians around 1500 B.C.E.  Theirs was a single piece of metal fashioned into two blades controlled by a strip between them that served as a kind of spring, keeping the blades apart until they were squeezed.
     The next evolution came from Rome.  By 100 C.E., they were using a device similar to what we have today: pivoted, cross-blade scissors.  Like the Egyptians, they tended to use bronze but they also used iron on occasion.  And that was pretty much it for the next sixteen hundred years: hand-made scissors using bronze or iron.  It wasn’t until 1761 that we see the next major step forward.  That's when English manufacturer Robert Hinchliffe adapted the design so scissors could be mass-produced.  He was also the first to begin making them out of steel.
     The blades on a pair of scissors are asymmetrical – they overlap.  That’s a good thing because our hands are asymmetrical, as well.  Our thumbs push out from the palm, and the fingers pull inward.  If you watch what happens when you make a fist, you’ll see what I mean.  There is a lateral component to the motion.  In practice, that means there is such a thing as right-handed and left-handed scissors.  With either one, the thumb blade will always be closer to the user’s body so that when the handles are squeezed, the two blades will be pushed together.  Try to use right-handed scissors in the left hand (or vice versa), however, and you will get the exact opposite motion – the blades will be pushed apart, and you will generally end up bending the paper instead of cutting it. 

     Who was the first to make molded handles so that you instantly knew which hand to use and which handle was for your thumb?  I don’t know, but I’ve always associated it with Fiskars and their orange handles. Whoever came up with it, it was one of the last, great advances in scissor design.  Along with that, though, there has also been an increasing specialization.  Today you can find scissors for hedge-trimming, pruning, cutting branches, cutting hair, cutting bolts, cutting bandages and all of them right beside surgical scissors, thinning shears, nail scissors, metal snips, button-hole scissors, dress-maker shears, pinking shears, carpet scissors, and cigar cutters.  And that’s just a partial list.
     Who would have thought that something so simple could get so complicated?  Well just take a look at the fingers that actually operate them, and you will see something even more remarkable.  Their constituent elements alone are impressive: bones, muscle, tendons, fat, nerves, blood vessels, ligament, cartilage, skin, nail, cuticle… and those are just the layman’s terms.  Even more astonishing is that all these parts are then packed together in a relatively small digit, and combined in a way that allows for feeling, movement, control and self-repair.  Our fingers are an absolute miracle of design.  What they do routinely year after year, decade after decade boggles the mind.
     You think scissors are impressive (I do)? Just take a look at what God has done.

“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”  (Psalm 139:13-14).