Saturday, July 18, 2009

Weekend Blog - Home Again

Just a short blog entry today, a post pretty much designed to move forward from my teaching/travels and back into life here around Brandon. The pictures are mostly Lake Junaluska: Me teaching, the keynote (Trevor Hudson) teaching, the amazing views. Then, close to the end, there's an update on the kitchen remodel - making some progress.

The house, of course, is a a huge wreck! Some amazing movement forward has been made vis-a-vis the remolding, but it is still very much consuming life-as-we-know-it around here. The kitchen, I guess, is having it's own spiritual retreat, reinventing itself from the ground up in accordance with the "everything must be disassembled and then rebuilt from scratch" school of thought.

We’ve been in this house thirteen years, and we’ve “had a go” at the kitchen (as the British would say) any number of times. An appliance here, a sink there, counter tops, molding and paint; but the footprint of flooring and cabinets always remained. Hemmed in by the structures that defined what we believed possible, nothing ever changed beyond superficiality.

This time it’s different, and the reasons are 13 years in the making. There’s a sense in which – as the Bible suggests – everything old needs to pass away before anything significantly new can take its place.

The old ways have been, in the words of the prophet Daniel, “Weighed on the scales and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27).

Patching up and painting over rot and mildew behind the bead-board does nothing to add real value. At some point we eventually need to bite the bullet and come in with a sledgehammer so the root of the problem is revealed.

Light it not only incisive – penetrating and razor sharp – light reveals decay so it can be removed before we attempt to move ahead. I’m not going to describe what we found behind the kitchen cabinets - sufficient to say it bought to mind what we all-too-easily allow to happen to our spiritual lives and our resources and our priorities if we're not willing to undergo the occasional remodel.... Yes, the walls were that bad!

This time last week ten days ago we had a nice clean slab of concrete in our kitchen and some strong studs on the wall. It was a great place to start. This week we've moved along very well... thanks to the radical nature of the preparation.

It turns out there's always something to think about! DEREK


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