Demo for Life

Earthquake!  Air Strike!  That’s what it feels and sounds like at my house right now.  Walls are shaking, dishes clattering, and the loud booms are pounding, pounding, pounding.

No, it’s not another summer thunderstorm.  It is the demolition of the enclosed porch on the back of our house in preparation for a new master suite. Since Mrs Sweetie and I will be moving in there, one of my friends has dubbed it the Sweetie Suite.

Today’s noise is the removal of the bricks across the back of the house.  I knew it would be loud, but the pounding and shaking got bad enough that I unloaded all the breakable dishes from the cupboard that is on the inside of that wall.  Who needs this many dishes anyway?

As we embark on this project, supposedly to last a couple of months, I am thinking about the similarities between building a house and building a life.  When you look at the finished product, you sometimes don’t realize everything that went into it.  So, for the next several weeks, I am going to observe this process with a reflection on “life building”.

When we moved into this house 21 years ago, that back room was already partially enclosed.  We finished it out and it has been used as a guest bedroom, a recording studio, a safe place for dogs to hide during thunderstorms, and a general place to toss and/or pile things that have not yet found a place to live in the rest of the house.  In other words, a junk room.

With the vision for the new space, the junk room had to go.  Consequently, we are now in day two of DEMO.  I could have saved some money if I had done it myself, but to do it right I would have had to have a demo demo, which would have slowed the process considerably.  Demo by professionals is much more efficient, not to mention the potential added costs of repairing things that should not have been demoed.  I guess we could call that the difficult dangers of deficient demoing.

So what does that have to do with “life building” (other than bearing strange resemblance to an alliterated sermon title)?  Sometimes there are things present in our lives that actually become a hindrance to progress.  We keep trying to add more and more, but failing to demo the things that are in the way. 

Hebrews 12:1 says, “Let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up.”

Even if we figure that out, we demo deficiently by trying to do it ourselves.  Our lives matter so much to God that He has not left us to the best that we can do.  If we will let Him do the demo, it will be done right. 

Losing some of those things may be unsettling at first, but the result will be the life for which we were truly made