renovation
Spiritual formation is renovation of the soul. That’s what I’m thinking as I empty the drawers of an old desk into a tote, as I shake my head over the accumulation of the years. In the deepest drawer, I find a knot of cords, and I smile, thinking this is how my thoughts would look if I could hold them in my hands. As I’ve been doing this, pulling out the innards of these rickety drawers, I have found bits of paper and old devices, empty boxes, books, even coins. This is the way of drawers, that most of them turn into tiny attic spaces, forgotten caverns where we store the things we don’t want to look at right now but feel we might use or sort through later. I keep thinking of the closeted parts of my mind, of the scarred up places in my heart where I have hidden the detritus of history.
Everything must come out so we can move this hulk of a desk, which still will be too heavy to carry down the stairs. All of it must be sorted, some of it cast off, some of it safely kept, which means that I will need to draw out each piece and hold it, look at it, examine and remember it. At the corners of the desk, the wood veneer has peeled away, and I can see the pulpy composite the manufacturer used to make the desktop. The metaphor is too plain: God saw me before I was formed (Psalm 139:15-16), and through the cracks in me where His own light spills, He can see all of what compounds me.
For me, renovation projects always first drag entropy into full view, and spiritual entropy is as real a thing as the physical kind. In this life, everything gradually crumbles; nothing stays new or clean. I think about that every time I dust or do laundry too, how we live in a world that must constantly be maintained and repaired. This is also true of our bodies, and in that case, we’re just slowing down an inevitable process. The apostle Paul summarized this in a phrase when he wrote that we are “outwardly wasting away,” and so also our homes, and except for the intervention of the Spirit of God, our thoughts and ideas and perspectives. But God has a thing for renovation, a word that, in its origins, means to make something new again.
On the desktop I see remnants of tape maybe even left over from the office life this desk had before we bought it used from an accounting firm that had embarked on its own reimagination. There was probably also a new logo and a new website. This desk likely had been replaced by something sleek and minimal when woodgrain veneer and multiple drawers and those pull out trays covered in coffee mug rings went out of fashion. Over the years, we have filled our home with an eccentric blend of retro castoffs and even some inherited pieces, the dining room table, some chairs. Very little of the furniture we use came to us new. But aren’t we all at least a little like this, living lives built on old and often inherited ideas? Maybe it’s time to refurbish some pieces, but it would be a mistake to empty the entire house of its history.
I open another drawer and shake my head, thinking, when and how did this get here? I reach in and pull out one of Adam’s CDs, one he probably played so often–certain phrases over and over and over and over on repeat—until Kevin felt he might lose every word except those few, until the only thing left to do for the preservation of sanity was to hide the CD. We do this, hide things away in order to keep on going. I used to find Adam’s motorized cars hidden beneath stacks of towels, at the bottom of a basket of blankets. I lift the CD up, twisting it in my fingers so Kevin can see. Light from the window flashes on the shiny silver surface, and he shrugs, grinning. And so it is when eccentricities come to light in compassionate places; we can smile.
I don’t worry much about what God will find when he searches my heart, even though I know I have drawers there full of empty and broken things. I can pray that prayer with David,
Search me, God, and know my heart;
Psalm 139:23-24
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
I can beg God to cleanse and change me because He’s always loved me to death–his death, not mine, and well before I had my scars, He imagined me all new. Ever since He moved in to this crazy place, He’s been dragging out the detritus.
