Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The Last Shall Be First


In 2006, we sold a beautiful Victorian house, which Travis remodeled, on Park Street, in Butte.  There were 4 bedrooms, an office, 3 bathrooms, nice big porch and lots of space in our brick home.  I loved the huge claw foot bathtub upstairs.  It was 6 feet of luxury.  The bathtub was luxury, the bathroom itself wasn’t.  It had so much potential but, having two other working bathrooms, in the house, left that one to low priority.  I took a bath once and was hit in the head by the piece of sheet rock that covered the window for privacy.  I could see through the framed in walls, could see the red and blue tubing for hot and cold.  I lost several bars of soap in the unfinished frame around the tub.   

We sold the house with the promise that we would finish the bathroom, and some other details, before we moved out in one month.  The day before we moved out, the bathroom was complete.  The tile around the bath was beautiful.  The tile everywhere, was beautiful!!  Travis used his skills and completed the room brilliantly.  I hung the shower curtain that I’d bought 2 years earlier, in anticipation of completion.  The sunlight poured in and lit-up the entire room and I wished I had time to take a bath in the amazing, finished room!  I took lots of photos.  Those photos constantly remind me to finish a job in time to enjoy it, before moving on. 

A friend was bothered by something, the other day.  She didn’t like the concept of someone finding God at the last minute and being saved, going to Heaven.  She didn’t accept that, that person could’ve lived a terrible, cruel life and, at the last minute, repent and promised a kingdom.   This friend is working on living an honest, Christian-focused life of service and someone else is going to get in with a final, “forgive me Lord!”  The whole idea has never bothered me but I didn’t think about why until she posed the question of the unfairness.  I was thinking about the Park Street bathroom, this morning.  I was thinking how it was finished and extraordinary, at the very last minute.  I thought how I only got to enjoy a fragment of what the room had to offer.  If we had completed the transition earlier, it could have brightened our lives there, been a place of beauty and refuge.  We could have lived within its beauty all along.  Instead, we got to experience it for one day before moving on.  

 I love where we are now, even more than Park Street, but we didn’t give Park Street a chance to bring all that it could to our lives.  My point being that, we can live with this beauty and refuge now or we can accept it last minute …it seems unwise to wait.  Why wait until something is almost gone, before admitting what would’ve made it so much better the entire time?  I don’t mind that the last will be first and the first last, because I have a place of beauty, strength and refuge here, now.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Thunderstorm

I feel like sleeping in, during a thunderstorm, this morning.  I'll take the lightly falling snow, Friday morning, getting Gavin ready for school instead!