 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
On A Personal
Note...
BUILDING the KINGDOM The Kingdom of God is a wolmanized deck! Well, not really. But there certainly are an awful lot of similarities between the two. In fact, it's almost eerie... My wife and I are having a four seasons room -- known around here as a Michigan Room -- built onto the back of our house. As part of that project, we had to have our existing deck moved to make way for the new room. The folks who are building the room actually set the new deck posts and beams, physically moved the deck, and then attached it to the new beams. It took them about two-and-a-half minutes. Well, okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. The bottom line is it didn't take them long and was very literally a "no-brainer" for them. The same was true for the new floor that they built and skirted with treated deck boards. It was all done in no time -- no sweat. Finishing the old deck is our job. We have to put up new railing, reattach the steps, and we decided to skirt it with deck boards so it would look better and match the new room. Pretty straight-forward stuff, so I took a day off work to get it done. That's when I discovered that the Kingdom of God is like a wolmanized deck. The groundwork had been done for us. The foundation was there. We knew what to do. We had the materials we needed. We had seen how easy it is to do and how nice it looks when it's finished. We were ready! Unfortunately, the lumber wasn't all perfectly straight. And getting things level and square was incredibly time-consuming. And our tools weren't quite the same as the builders'. They had a nail gun -- wham! wham! wham! wham! -- and a board was up. We had a drill and deck screws. We had to measure each board because the ground sloped so badly. Many of the boards needed to be cut at an angle. We had to drill pilot holes so the screws wouldn't split the boards. Eventually, we went through both batteries on the cordless drill and had to use the corded drill to drill pilot holes AND drive the screws. When we are building the Kingdom, these problems are not uncommon. Sometimes, the groundwork has been done for us, so we imagine that it will be easy. However, we don't always have the right tools for the job. Often, we have watched others who make it look easy, and thus we set our goals to high -- almost ensuring our own failure. We find ourselves having to go slowly and carefully, improvising along the way, and constantly stepping back to make sure it is still looking okay. At the end of the day, we are exhausted. We have not completed everything we had expected, we are sore and aching, and we almost dread having to go back out the next day and pick up where we left off. However, if we refrain from chastising ourselves and take another step back, we see that what we DID accomplish looks fantastic! It is solid, well-built, square and level. It looks every bit as good -- if not better -- than that which was done by the pros.
Yup. That's what working on our deck was like.
And if you haven't done so in a while, take a couple steps back and admire your handiwork. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Peace, Sound off! Tell me what you think! Copyright 2002 by Brandon Jubar |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
