This is less of a stretch than it first appears. First, some context: Seventeen years ago when I married Kathryn, we bought a new bed (she did not own one, I slept on a futon). It is like a low dresser, six drawers on each side and two long central drawers from the middle that slide out from the foot of the bed. In the early years it was beautiful, but in the course of urban ministry and several rough moves and having three children (who all love the bed and play with, on and around it), it had fallen into disrepair and threatened to slide further into decrepitude. So, since we had to take the thing apart again into pieces in order to move it, and since we’re moving into a new house with nice wood floors, I decided I would refinish the bed– sort of a housewarming gift to my wife and myself.
Structurally it was mostly sound. Only the trim boards that hold the mattress in place were falling apart, and those will be easy to repair or fun (but tricky) to replace. It just needed to be stained to match our bedroom floor… and that meant sanding it down to bare wood.
I decided to do the work in our nearly-empty old apartment before our rental term was up for the month: a convenient uncluttered place to work, and our bed gets refinished before arriving in our new home.
As I knelt down by one of the cabinet sections and set to work with my pad sander, I soon realized several things about our old bed, and how similar my pad sander was to the Holy Spirit.
1. Some stains, scars and scum cannot be washed off of wood furniture. But all of them yield to a pad sander clad with 80-grit paper.
2. As you run a pad sander over an old, well-used piece of furniture, it reveals every little dent and scratch in stark, powdered relief… then it abrades them away to smooth newness, if you are patient and keep going over the problem areas again and again.
3. The pad sander starts out with rough-grade sandpaper, seeming to scratch and harm the wood in its own right… but then progresses to finer and finer grades until you are doing more polishing than sanding. This too requires patience. The result is a silky surface that shocks several of my neighbors who feel it out of curiosity.
4. Prolonged use of the pad sander eventually makes your hand warm and tingly.
5. The pad sander’s sound can be mistaken for a “rushing wind” by other residents of your building.
Okay, #5 is a bit of a stretch, and I did have a shop vac going at the same time to collect the dust, so that might have provided some of that sound effect. 
