A couple of days ago my four year old son and I watched a neighbour’s house as it was being fully demolished. Yep, down to an empty block of land. You may think that sounds like a little boy’s fantasy come true, but actually my little guy was petrified. We watched as the excavator ripped this house apart, tearing the roof off, dismantling the brick work and just tearing down and crushing this construction room by room. There were concrete bits flying everywhere, glass shattering and lots and lots of rubble – it went from a house to one big mess. Although it was fascinating, there was a sense of nostalgia and sadness about it, even though it wasn’t our home, and nor did we know the people who lived there.
I jumped out of the car to film it on my mobile phone, knowing that my other children would love to watch it too. As I stood there recording the extravaganza, I got chatting to one of the excavators who told me that the average single story home can be fully demolished in twenty minutes! Twenty minutes? Wow, it takes atleast six months to build a house, and twenty minutes to pull it down?
It really got me thinking that sometimes in life we can spend so much time building a relationship, a job, a dream, a bank balance or whatever, and we can focus on that exercise, we can commit to it wholeheartedly, we can have visions about a perfect future that extend from it, and then with one bad move, with one poor choice, one unwise comment, it can all seem like it’s falling apart.
It got me thinking about how easy it is to create chaos in our life. Why is it so much easier to make a mess, say the wrong thing or do something inappropriate in a moment of weakness or poor judgement, and why is it that those blunders take so long to repair.
Have you ever found yourself thinking; “Bother, if only I could turn back time, God I’d only need you to press rewind for two minutes, just long enough for me to take that one single sentence back, is that too much to ask?” Unfortunately we know that is just not possible!
I know that there have been times in my life where poor judgement or a lack of self-control over my words, which only took seconds to spit out, took me way more than seconds to repair. This whole house demolition experience for me turned into a prayer that day. My prayer was this: “Lord I want to be so aligned with your way of thinking, with your emotions, with your thoughts and with your heart, because I don’t want to waste precious days of my life cleaning up the unnecessary rubble that I am quite capable of creating if I step outside of your guidance and wisdom.
Do you ever pray that too? That we would be so aligned to Jesus, and that His ways would be our ways, His thoughts our thoughts and His heart our heart – because it just takes so long to repair what our unwise ways can pull down in 20 measly minutes. Thank God He is a restoring God, and yes, ofcourse He can clean up our mess, but if we can prevent it, why not!
