Wire-rope is made of various strands of wire woven together into a helix – it's often called 'cable'. Wire-rope is used in cranes for lifting and for supporting structures such as suspension bridge. In some applications it isn't used as much as it once was. When we moved into our new property there was an old rotary clothes line in a heap of rubbish in the paddock. The old "Hills Hoist" had wire-rope, on which the washing was hung to dry. The new rotary clothes line in the backyard doesn't have wire-rope. The wire-rope has been replaced by a synthetic, plastic-looking clothesline.

Recently I cleaned up that pile of rubbish in the paddock and in the process dismantled the old rotary clothes line. I was surprised. I spent some time disentangling the wire-rope from the ruins of the old "Hills Hoist". As I did that the wire-rope automatically coiled itself up. That wire-rope had been stretched out for decades in all kinds of weather. Year in and year out clothes were hung on it – so this wire not only expanded and contracted with the weather, it was also stretched when load after load of heavy, wet washing was pegged to that clothes line. And yet the instant in which I released that wire from the wrecked clothesline it automatically recoiled itself back into the roll of wire that it was when it was first strung out on that clothesline.

Methinks there are a couple of lessons in that wire-rope.

Over the years I've seen people who are like that wire-rope. There was the man who unexpectedly lost his wife to some rare illness. One day she was there, the next she was gone. That triggered a crisis for him and he began to seek after God. He attended church with my parents and seemed to commit himself to the Lord. He became a changed man and even talked for a time of studying for the ministry. But then he met another lady and slowly his church-going petered out because she wasn't a Christian. Before long he was the same man he used to be before he showed an interest in the things of God. It's as if the coiled wire-rope had been unwound, straightened out and put to good use on a clothesline, but after a while the wire came off the line and it automatically fell back, right into its previous format.

That's a rather negative wire-rope lesson – a reminder that we human beings have a "default position" and that when God removes His hand of grace we just curl right back up to be our old sinful selves.

Perhaps I should add another aspect to this recoiling of wire rope. I recall that in a previous life I began my apprenticeship as a maintenance fitter. We often worked with wire-rope in all sorts of circumstances and I had seen this feature of wire-rope back then. In fact there is a dangerous side to this. When wire-rope under tension breaks, or when the shackles that tie it to whatever, break, then the recoil of the wire-rope can be a menace. It has a tendency to flick back at a great rate of knots and whip the unsuspecting user. The same happened with the man who reverted to his default position after a time of seeming to walk with God. There were those in the church who were hurt and others were bewildered by what happened. The recoil of wire-rope can leave some painful bruises.

But my reflection on that wire-rope also led to another lesson... a much more positive one.

I believe it was the Jesuits who said, "Let us have a child until he's seven and then the devil can have him." What they meant was that if for the first seven years a good and healthy foundation is laid down in the life of a child then it really doesn't matter all that much what will happen later. Maybe they got that idea from the book of Proverbs which teaches, "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it" (Prov.22:6). When the wire-rope is first made it is tightly wound into a coil and even many years later – after being stretched and pulled... it still returns into the coil in which it was originally formed.

How important that makes it for us to teach our children to walk with Jesus in the formative years of their life.

John Westendorp