Build Something New

Tina will tell you that I hate anything having to do with maintenance, repair or replacement. After all the work and sweat and expense, you basically have what you had before. But give me a wall to rip out, a change to make, an upgrade to install, a room to renovate and I'm all over it.

This makes the current sound drifting in through my open screen this morning like sweet music to my ears. Just down the alley, on one of the many empty lots in the neighborhood, a new house is going up. The asymmetric pounding of hammers, the whir of skill saws, the rhythmic cadence of nailguns, Mexican workers calling to each other contrasted with the unlikely Tom Jones CD in their boombox (who knew?) all combine to make me feel hopeful, excited, even joyful.

It's the same emotion I experienced when walking into my friend Steve and Sheila's 108-year-old house in Lowell earlier this morning to see the once damaged, wide-plank, Douglas Fir floors being sanded and re-finished. The honey-colored beauty under my feet produces something inexplicable in me. The floors unify the rooms; they speak a language of restoration and generational connectivity, but also of hope, of opportunity, of progress, of the future, and again, of joy.

Have you noticed, the subject of building, of architecture, of design, of physical structures comes up time and again in the Bible and in teaching of Jesus -- a farmer building a grain tower, the architecture and decoration of the temple, the tower of Siloam, the parameters of the New Jerusalem. Certainly, Jesus used the common places of life as a vehicle to convey truth, including where people lived, worked and worshipped. And we are to, like Noah, look forward to taking up residence in a city one day, whose architect and builder is God. The description of Heaven is of a luminous city made of precious materials, with God himself as the source of light -- a place with a definite wow factor.

Here, in the waning weeks of my sabbatical, as I prepare for resuming ministry, I find myself longing for that kind of hope regarding the future, the hope of progress, the sights and sounds of building something new, of making improvements, of seeing change. I do not want to simply maintain what has been built in my work over the last decade. I guess that means that God has done his work in me, the work that I prayed would happen on this extended sabbath. He has sanded the floors of my soul, ripped out a few false walls in my spirit, and improved the infrastructure of my will. Now, God, make me into a builder.

Does anyone have a Tom Jones CD I could borrow?