Building Something
I am not a carpenter…at all. However I love to build things; I have trouble though.. things just don’t really come out as planned I try to take special care but still my carpentry projects tend to end up being less than awesome. The week of this new year I planned to build a cabinet to hold all of my musical equipment. The idea was that I could lock it all away from my autistic son and when I wanted to play I would just open it up and start playing. So I planned it out, took all the measurements and started cutting up the wood. Over the course of the week preceding new year’s day I worked tirelessly… I spent a lot of time thinking and praying about things… and at times it seemed miraculous that everything was coming together so well!… left over pieces were exactly the lengths that I needed for other parts of the cabinet, stuff was just fitting together so perfectly… I thought “God is helping me build this cabinet!” I worked several hours every night for a week getting things just right. I painted it with several coats of black paint till it was shiny and pretty cool looking. New Year’s Eve I finished the last coat of paint. I was excited that the new year would start out with a new piece of furniture that I built and mostly that I would be able to play music any time I wanted without having to set up my gear every single time!
New Year’s Day Dawned and I excitedly carried my creation up from my basement wood shop and proudly placed it in the living room. I was so excited as I grabbed my synthesizer and began to lay it on the desktop of the case… my smile quickly became a frown, It didn’t fit? how could it not fit? I tried every imaginable way to somehow work it in but the reality was I had somehow made the cabinet too narrow! I was so angry I cried… I spent a week… working on this stupid thing… “I thought God was helping me!” I said though clenched teeth and tears in the corners of my eyes… I went back in my mind through all the things I had thought about and prayed about and… all the things that worked out so well on the project… the pieces going together so well… nothing made sense… and I was so frustrated and angry… and confused at why God would seemingly help me do such a great job on a project, making such a solid piece of furniture… when it was too small!
I spent most of New Year’s Day being angry with God… I had tried so hard and been so careful and measured multiple times… but somehow had succeeded in making another useless piece of furniture… So God wasn’t helping me then? why had things worked out so well? I was so happy before I put that stupid cabinet in my living room! I really searched my heart and my perceptions of things and struggled with understanding the meaning of the whole thing.
On the evening of New Years Day I was up late… I watched a cheesy religious movie about the rapture on one of the christian network channels and then watched David Crowder on some big outreach campaign… he said… “you know all God really wants is a relationship with us… for us to take the time to get to know him” I sat there just kinda matching that up against how things had been going that day… that week actually… And it actually made sense… I was “building something” down in my basement every night… it was a relationship… not a stupid cabinet… sure God was helping me build my cabinet… just like his hand is on everything else in my life… but the fact that God touches the things that we build out of our own strength does not guarantee us perfection… or even usefulness! We often think that because things go well that “God is in it” or if they don’t go well “God is not in it” when that’s not true at all.. God’s ultimate purposes for our lives are for us to have a relationship with him… so if we build a flawed reality from our flawed dreams… and we blame him for it… is he really to blame? We need to look past the physical to see what we are really building in our lives… are we building our dreams out of selfishness or are we building dreams of love and relationship.
As I watched the trash truck drive away with my cabinet in the back… I cringed a little… I thought… how much yet do i have to build and then destroy in this world? … so that I understand how to walk this earth as a son of the Most High.