creation's beauty and the tear down uglies...

Something about the cool and wet weather has made this little town in the mountains look and feel like the Northwest. The air is softer, the rain clouds roll in every afternoon, and the flowers are so big and beautiful (for our dry high desert).

Tonight as I watered the bleeding hearts, tiny baby hostas and the new raspberry-rose, a doe (a deer) sat and watched. For an hour as I moved dirt, pulled weeds and garden hoses around the yard she just would follow me with her head and twitch her ears but never leave me. She rested back in the mulberry trees and let me be busy. What a treat - a new friend.

Again today the trees were clapping their hands and dancing in the wind and it made me grin, grateful for a Creator and a creation that delights in our delight. I love this God of ours.

* * *

The work at the stonehouse (besides the yard) the past few weeks has been this messy mess:

(this was the gaping hole in the kitchen wall)

(the walls are scored for plastering...messy...)
(with wallpaper gone, you can see how the front of the house was pulling away...great.)
(the front room with all of the wallpaper pulled off and all the plaster falling off in sandy flakes)

It had to happen. My friend John (who did the amazing work on the outside rock work) and I have had discussions about this *job* for a good 2 years. We have thought about it, talked about it, looked into it...but it wasn't until I got curious and started ripping huge sheets of wallpaper off the walls that something finally got started. That was last week.

And oh, my goodness did that start something BIG...yikes.

I am amazed that John is still talking to me. I didn't give him much time to help me get this done - 2 weeks - nothing gets done in this town in that amount of time, ever. This project is on a record breaking roll.

Then this:

(we broke into the dark chamber of secrets)

(it was actually 100 years of black soot.
So then I enlisted another helper...and we made a REALLY BIG mess...)
(we all think he looks like a zombie, but it's just Pete
lacking fresh air and tired of hours of hard labor)

Okay, so we could have been more interested in seeing what was behind the bricked up fireplace like 6 months ago or something, but no. For reasons still not too clear we got excited to do it right now. Sort of "the place is already a mess, a little more won't hurt?"

* * *

So it got me thinking about this whole daily divine mess we live in...

Why do we spend so much of our lives tearing down and building up?

Can we just "live a happy little life" without getting messy with God?

So much of the real life changing work (for me) has always been in the tear-down. In comprehending things, in order to *really get it* I have to get out of the nice clean box I have built around myself and let things rip away.

Tear down is painful.
To really let God cut, chisel, scrub all the junk away?

Sometimes I still like the junk He is trying to help me get rid of and worse still, sometimes I don't even realize I have junk???

All I really know about any of this is: The Creator of our lives (of my life) likes to tear down. Jesus promised, "Everything my Father didn't plant He will uproot." Sometimes I help Him along - tearing all my wallpaper out or messing up so badly that big chunks of my life fall apart and I scream out loud for help, but other times the tearing down just comes out of nowhere...

Well, as much as I know the tear down is going to happen and is happening...I know that my Creator loves to build. I am going to hang onto His promise in all of this (and stand back and watch).

"Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it."

I will post pics in a few days...after I get all this soot off.jj