this weekend i went to the building we'll be living in next year to poke around, make arrangements for next week's work day, and to investigate installing a shower. the day left me drained, excited, and somewhat weary of what lies ahead (no, not beneath). as i was sitting in the car thinking about the life i could be having - the one with the new car payment, the nice safe apartment NOT in the ghetto with clean stylish furnishings and perfect climate control - i found myself evaluating the whole situation. "man, this just seems like an awful lot of work," i said to myself. "will it even work out? will it be worth it? it would be so much easier to even do this in a building that wasn't so old and run down. or a new one. just build a new one and live in the ghetto."
ah, yes. but that is the problem, isn't it? how easy it is to raise money for an idea. it happens all the time. someone has a vision, a plan. they get an architect and lay out on paper God's master plan for the community for the next 100 years. then they raise money, purchase land, and millions of dollars later that vision becomes a reality. well, the building part at least.
how much harder, and how much less certain, is the work of renovation. there is no clean slate, no nice new designs. there is, however, history. there are the marks and remnants of other people from the past. there's the unexpected. the labor. the cost. the sense that all this work would be so much easier if we were to just tear down and make it all new. restoring is much harder than building new.
and yet this is the work of Jesus in our lives. yes, we are a new creation. the old has gone and the new has come. but we must also take off our old selves with their practices and put on the new selves, which are being renewed in knowledge in the image of our Creator. He makes all things new. He makes them new. we are being renewed. in that mysterious way, we are 100% new in God's eyes, without imperfection. and yet we are being renewed. Jesus has guaranteed the destination while preventing our missteps from becoming a hinderance to us approaching the Father along the way.
so i like to think of this whole 'living in the church thing' as a work of renovation. i think there's value in renovation as opposed to building new. i think it's what Jesus wants to do with all of us. it may not be easy for us, but he has already taken care of the part we had no hope of fixing ourselves and placed us in a position to be in relationship with the Father.
what do you think about all this? what value do you see in renovation - of objects or in general? is the image of God in us what makes us love to fix up old things and make them useful? why are restored things often worth so much more and considered more beautiful than the prefabricated newness we can buy in the store? is this the image of God's desire in us to perform a renovation of the heart? is the end result of that work of more value than all else?
Yeah it's hard work but we can do it because God's laid it ahead of us. And yes if the dog is well behaved it can come to work for a day. Everyone loves dogs here. Can we get a border collie mut? The more I think about the bigger louder dogs the more I miss breezy hmmm.
ReplyDeleteI think your analogy for the building and God's work in our lives is right on. it is the history that was there before in a person or place or thing that we enjoy and then the transformation to something new that we love.
ReplyDeletewell said jeff. i also think about the correlation between this building and our lives--how if we think of all of it and everything we might get overwhelmed with the mess. but we do what we can and we let it take the time it has to take. if only we were so patient with ourselves. and if we could really see the lower parts of ourselves that need so much work--but we just don't go in those rooms so often.
ReplyDelete