Life in This Broken-Down House
yet to be done, it is difficult to celebrate progress for very long. You have worked hard, but so much restoration is still needed. This interwoven set of difficulties is the environment you live in every day. It is the only environment you have. It conditions what you face as an individual. It shapes what you experience in your family. It structures the struggles of your marriage and friendships. It creates the stresses of your community. It determines the issues that politicians and government officials must deal with. It molds the work of the church. It affects the condition of the physical environment. It shapes the struggles of your heart and mind. It even determines the things you deal with in your body. The fact that you live in a broken-down house in the midst of restoration makes everything more difficult. It removes the ease and simplicity of life. It requires you to be more thoughtful, more careful. It requires you to listen and see well. It requires you to look out for difficulty and to be aware of danger. It requires you to contemplate and plan. It requires you to do what you don’t really want to do and to accept what you find difficult to accept. You want to simply coast, but you can’t. Things are broken and they need to be fixed. There is work to do. You can tell if a house is being condemned or restored by the size of the tools that are in use. If there’s a crane equipped with a wrecking ball out front, you can give up on restoration. But if there are a lot of hand tools around, that’s a sign of hope. True restoration takes patience, subtlety, skill, and grace. I live in Philadelphia where a lot of restoration goes on. I once wandered into a row house that was being lovingly restored. In the high- ceilinged living room I found a man on scaffolding removing antique moldings. It was triple-crown molding—three separate moldings fitted together to create a beautiful effect. He wasn’t trying to pry off the molding with a big crowbar because he knew that would splinter and break it. He was using a very small hammer to drive very small wedges between the molding and the wall. It was a tedious job, requiring much patience, but he did
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