God The Builder

Hebrews 3:4 – “For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.”

With the threat of Y2K on the horizon, I sold my home in Lufkin and packed my children and belongings bound for Crockett.  I left behind the home my late husband and I built with counters and floors he labored to lay, with stucco front, with glass block window in the bathroom we shared.  The morning of his funeral God filtered in on a thousand rays of glory shine through that window, and infused me with grace and courage for life beyond the death of my spouse.  My parents feared I might be on the verge of a breakdown for on the day I buried him I attended worship beforehand, having seen the Lord and not died myself.

Eight years later and forty-five miles away, I purchased an acre and a half a few blocks from my parent’s lake house.  The kids and I moved into their home for the year it took to build a home of our own.  With their help and that of other family and friends, the house slowly took shape.  The heavily wooded property sloped dramatically.  We hired loggers who came in and raped the land of the timber leaving behind a disaster to clean up.  In the days that followed oily appearing water surfaced.  An underground spring supplying trees and lush vegetation now bubbled up making mud soup.  The contractor determined to build the home on pier and beam and did extensive dirt work to level a pad to support the cinder block foundation.  Many stories regarding the building of this house took place between this paragraph and the next.

Several years into living in this house I noticed the floor in the family room seemed to give a little when I walked in front of the sofa.  For months I dismissed this change, but finally determined to crawl under the house with my Dad to survey the cause.  On opening the small access door a musty smell greeted us.  Flashlights in hand we crawled toward the center of the house to inspect the underside of the floor.  Growing in the moist sand every variety of mushroom and fungus surrounded us.  Colossal toadstools of all colors thrived beneath the house.  On looking up we noted the subflooring had a mottled appearance, particularly in the vicinity of the den.  Thankfully, the supports remained firm, but the flooring required immediate replacement.  First we treated the entire underside of the house with Clorox bleach drying the area thoroughly with fans to kill the mildew.  Next, my Dad removed and replaced the flooring from the topside.  Finally, he put a moisture barrier (tar paper) on the underside of all flooring and likewise covered the supports.

This took care of the present damage, but in order to preclude this from happening again, the crawl space needed light and air circulation.  He removed covers from all vents put in place during winter months.  Then he installed two large exhaust fans in the access doors on both sides of the house.  Cross ventilation and more light made the space inhospitable for all but daddy long legs which congregated under the house by the thousands!!

As in houses, so spiritual foundations must be properly laid and maintained in order to prevent compromise.  We must invite and permit the wind of the Spirit to continually and freely circulate and the light of God’s Word to radiate to keep our life in the Lord sound.  Barriers to corruption and decay need to also to be put in place.  There are times when our foundation may need attention or maintenance – times when our Christian life seems unstable like the springy floor of my living room!  On those occasions we need to ask our Father to enter the crawl space with us to examine and reveal any problems in need of immediate attention.  Abba may well need to replace lies with truth, to uncover hidden festering wounds, to heal and repair brokenness.  I am so thankful the Lord builds and rebuilds when necessary a spiritually healthy, secure environment for us to live in.

    

Safe in the Shadow,

Terry 





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