Broken-Down House
to be because everything is so much more difficult in such a terribly broken world. But let us also see that this world of ours is more than a broken-down house. It is a broken-down house in the process of being restored. There’s a Whole Lot of Restoration Going On Like my father-in-law examining that ruined little house in Miami, God is not willing for this broken-down world to stay in its sorry condition. As Creator, he is able to look at it and see promise, the promise of a total restoration of its beauty. And he has asked you to move in with him to be one of his tools of restoration. While it is hard to live in a house that needs to be restored, in some ways it is even harder to live there while the restoration takes place. Not only is everything more difficult in a broken house, there is also the dust and dirt of restoration and the intermittent noise and chaos and sweat and soreness that comes with the repairs. Try as you may to keep the dust sealed off in one room, you find grit in the drawers and on your food. The din of creative destruction wears you down. The labor wears you out. There are days when you simply don’t want to face it. Other days, you forget the mess you’re living in for a moment, only to step on a rusty nail or through a rotted step. You often find yourself dreaming of what it would be like to live in a house that needed no restoration, and you wonder if the job will ever be completed. You want to hold on to the promise of everything eventually being fixed, but it’s hard. You want to rest, but there’s work to do. You want to escape, but you can’t—this is your house and you have to live in it. You wonder if what you are seeing is really progress. In fact, it often seems like you’re losing ground. The kitchen is more usable than it was, and the pipes from the upstairs bathtub don’t drench the living room anymore. But now the staircase has been ripped out and the only way to your bedroom is by a ladder! In light of this mess and all the work
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