Wisdom in the Winds

We have this new house. My husband is a fantastic contractor--skill up the wazoo. The first two were all the work and contriving and detail that everyone warns you about. They turned out as solid and lovely as he envisioned. Took about eight months to build each of them. This is the third house he's built for us. It has single-handledly mde up for ALL the breaks and smooth-going we experienced with the other two. At my husband's funeral, I will know that he would have lived another ten years if it wasn't for this house...

I’ve written pages and pages in my mind about all the junk that’s happened with the building of this place. Fiction could not be wilder or stranger. Yesterday brought yet another gem.

I came home to see the newly poured driveway pad and sidewalk. They were texture brushing the surface, finalizing the project. Not half an hour later it started to rain. The weatherman said it was a bruiser of a storm that was pummeling the town just north of us. Sure enough, the winds blasted in, flying my hanging baskets horizontally, whipping the cover ten feet away from the hot tub, and bringing with it the kind of rain that precedes a tornado. Only a taste of what Charley brought, but certainly doing its own Pacific NW brand of damage—felled trees, power outages, flash floods—and brand new concrete that looks ten years old already.

My poor husband paced around the house, looking helplessly out at all that hard work, all that new surface getting pelted, abraded, assaulted. It’s been in the 90’s for weeks now. We pour concrete, and a BA Storm gusts in. It’s always miserable to be helpless to help the helpless.

As we watched the storm from the garage, our 15 year-old came out and announced that not only was there water drizzling into three buckets he set in his brother’s bedroom, but water was getting Wallace all wet (the nickname for the deer head in the basement).

My best consolation was that it wasn’t a matter of life and death—my family was safe. Everything else is expendable.
Takes me a while to process, but eventually I reminded myself that this was no surprise to Him. His concern is more for my reaction to the event than the event itself. Oswald Chambers’ words to me this morning were, “It is never God’s will that we should be anything less than absolutely complete in Him. Anything that disturbs rest in Him must be cured at once, and it is not cured by being ignored, but by coming to Jesus Christ. If we come to Him and ask Him to produce Christ-consciousness, he will always do it until we learn to abide in Him.”

The abrasions, the ambushes, the drainage, even good surprises, can cause the feeling of isolation or abandonment. But I like this verse in the Amplified, I will not, I will not in any degree leave you helpless nor forsake nor ^[5] let you down ,^[6] relax My hold on you! ^[7] Assuredly not! (Hebrews 13:5)

I flipped to today’s reading in My Utmost because I was looking for a reminder of some truth in this. I smiled as I read this: Never allow the dividing up of your life in Christ to remain without facing it. Beware of leakage, of the dividing up of your life by the influence of friends or of circumstances; beware of anything that is going to split up your oneness with Him and make you see yourself separately... “Come unto Me.” LEAKAGE! Did you catch that?! Oh, man, God has a crazy sense of humor...

House number three—fraught with difficulty, delay, disappointment, doubt, disturbance, debt, and near-disaster. But I cannot look at it all apart from the knowledge down in my deeps that His wisdom is in the leaks, scrapes, and displeasures. It’s where I need Him. It’s where He grows me up and develops me into the me I want to be. I can’t say I welcome the junk, but I know it’s not all for nothing. And I know I’m not alone.