Mudding over the Drywall Tape.
Imagining Something Better
It’s early on Saturday, the morning just stirring under its blanket of darkness. I’m writing at my desk, upstairs, when I hear it:
The whining buzz of a power tool slices through the stillness.
I leave my keyboard and coffee, race downstairs, into the garage. “Rich! It’s six o’clock!”
He understands, sets down the belt sander. “I didn’t think it would be that loud with the doors closed,” he mumbles.
“I could hear it upstairs,” I say.
He sighs, sets down the tool, follows me inside. “I’ll make breakfast,” I promise.
I’m cracking eggs while he sips coffee and I think about this work he’s doing, building himself a shop space inside our garage. I’m remembering his enthusiasm as we roamed the lumber department, ticking off the items on his bill of materials, sighting down the two-by-tens to ensure they’re true. I’m patient as he chooses.
Good materials draw the work smoothly from his hands, I know.
He had shown me his plan, explained the benefits of the workbench design he’d selected, the value of the sturdy shelves he’d build. “I’ll mount the grinder here,” he said. And “I’ve never hung drywall before.”
I hear his eagerness to tackle a dream, to shape it with wood and gypsum and screws into something he sees.
After we’ve shared eggs and toast, after the sun has risen and hopefully the neighbors too, after the informal overnight noise-curfew lifts, I hear that buzz-whine again, and I smile. When Rich decides to create something, he devotes himself to its making. Pleasure glows from his sawdusted skin as he builds the thing seen-but-not-yet-being.
He’s good at making stuff because he can imagine something better than now.
Isn’t that why I married him? Because I cherished his conviction that something better can made? We walked into this marriage in mid-life, each with prior failures stacked behind us. A few heads shook, a few fingers wagged. But he knew. And I knew.
The Master Builder always imagines something better. All we have to do is submit to His sander, knocking off the burrs of selfishness, His planer that trues the warped places in our hearts. Our marriage is a dream we pursue every day. It’s a patient project. Some days we misread the plans, drive a nail where none belongs.
But the One who dovetailed our hearts, He yanks the miscreant nail, putties the hole, sands smooth the small wounds.
And all the while, He’s building something better between us. Of us.
37 But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:37-39 (NASB)
I’m linking up with Jennifer Lee over at Getting Down with Jesus for The High Calling‘s series on marriage. I hope you’ll stop by.
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