I remember moving into a newly constructed home and thinking it would
always be new. As I stood outside and admired the house it never crossed my
mind that in 20-25 years the house would need new shingles, siding and windows.
In my world, ‘new’ should last forever.
July 03, 2013
Maintenance Required
If I buy used equipment or get something as a hand-me-down, I expect it
to someday quit working or wear out. However, I find it painful when I buy
something new and it dies, needs to be replaced or needs to be repaired.
I love that Paul paints a picture of believers in Christ being a new
creation, but I wonder if for some of us the newness becomes comfortable,
rather than new. “Therefore, if anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2
Cor 5:17 NIV)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I love looking at pictures of dig sites in Biblical Archeology Review. Usually some bloke will be standing in the middle of a few rough walls rising only a couple feet from the leveled ground that probably wasn’t the building’s actual floor. Most of these wall “stubs” are two or three feet thick, and sometimes as much as six feet or more. And they are all made of carefully placed stones mortared together for stability. It must have felt cozy coming home to such solid structures. They must have felt so eternal, having been there since before “granddad’s” time and being as resistant as rock to whatever the imagination could throw against them into the future. Yet today, we must dig into the dirt to find them.
-----The fish eats the fly, the cat eats the fish, the elephant steps on the cat, which mess the fly eats. Except for the elephant, the destruction of one causes life for the other. Then, sooner or later, even the elephant feeds the flies. Much of the reason the rest of those old walls do not stand is that their stones built a new house elsewhere, which today is also under the dirt. Consumption by “moth and rust” became the law of the land as soon as Eve’s teeth broke the skin of that apple (and probably sooner, when her intent turned from the Lord to her self.) We live in a wonderful world of perpetual breakdown.
-----Then I like to cast my mind across that chasm to where my spirit lives in the Lord. There the old law has not changed. There, everything does not seek its lowest level of existence, as it does by this new law of the bitten apple; it does not exhibit this slow, perpetual trending towards chaos. There repair is the unknown because maintenance is a part of its natural being.
-----I like that feeling. And I am only beginning to realize that my aversion to repairing broken things runs counter to my new nature. The stuff of my temporal existence, including my body, are a part of the chaos place. But my mind is being transformed into that of the maintaining place to which my spirit connects. It should like to express its new nature through performing maintenance upon what breaks down around me. I’m all excited to go and practice.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment