Spiritual Home Improvement

By Alan B. Ward

Shortly after we were married, Hurricane Isabel hit the community where we live. While I personally did not have my home completely destroyed by the storm, but we did have to leave our home after the storm hit. Toxic mold had built up over long years with a wet basement (the flooding caused by Isabel was just the last straw) and our home was declared unsafe for us to live in. And so, three months into our marriage my new bride and I had to leave our home involuntarily and take up residence in a town home in Glen Burnie, MD until repairs on the parsonage were complete. We now look back on that time and jokingly call it our exile to Glen Burnie and that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that this was a challenging time early-on in our marriage. The experience gave me at least some sense of how difficult it is to have to physically rebuild from the ground up after a storm passes.

As difficult as our involuntary physical remodeling project was, I think the involuntary spiritual remodeling project I’ve had to embark on this year is much harder. I’ve built my house on the Rock [Matthew 7:24-27]: deep within me, the foundation of what I believe about God still holds. In fact I think this foundation is precisely what has helped to keep me going in the midst of the “howling storms of life” that our family has endured in recent months.

We gave birth to twin girls a year ago May; one of the girls was very sick when she was born and only lived two days. The tragedy has obviously rocked our world; we are still processing our grief and struggling back to our feet. Even with a rock foundation, over the last year or so it has felt to me like everything above that foundation lies in ruins and I must rethink all that I thought I knew about God. In a very real sense, I must rebuild that “home” where God dwells in me, and where I connect with God from the ground up.

So much of what I thought I “knew” and was familiar with, even comfortable with, in relating to God has been washed away by the recent storms. Rebuilding is certainly a daunting task and can seem a little overwhelming. Sometimes, I don’t know where to start. At the same time, I realize that this is also an opportunity. Like the homeowner who rebuilds a better home after the storm, I too have the chance to rebuild a spiritual home that’s stronger than the one it replaced. It won’t be easy… but it is possible.

As I work to rebuild my spiritual home, I take comfort in knowing that these kinds of involuntary spiritual home improvement projects are nothing new. This is something God’s people have had to do periodically throughout the Scriptures—both as individuals and as communities of faith. God’s people were slaves in Egypt for 400 years before God rose up Moses to confront Pharaoh. They had probably almost completely forgotten the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph from their past. The only reality they had known for several generations was life in Egypt as slaves. So when Moses led them out of Egypt, the people had to rebuild what in meant to follow God from the ground up. They needed lots of specific instruction and guidance about how they should proceed—hence the first five books of the Bible contain so many exacting details for “constructing” a life in the desert where they now found themselves.

Several centuries later, God’s people found themselves in exile in foreign lands and cut off from all that they knew, and all that was familiar. The Temple in Jerusalem had been the focus of their worship of God and the foreign invaders had destroyed it completely. (What a blow this must have been to the people’s spirit!) They had to rebuild their spiritual home from the ground up and develop new ways to worship God apart from the Temple—this is when the first forms of synagogue worship began for the Jewish people.

Between the Old and New Testaments, God’s people waited 400 years for the long-promised Messiah to come. But when Jesus finally did come the people didn’t recognize him for who he was. He didn’t match with the people’s expectations of what a Messiah should be. Those who would follow after Jesus as his disciples were forced to rebuild their spiritual home and rethink what it really meant for Jesus to be the liberating king he claimed to be. I think they really had to rebuild their understanding of the Messiah from the ground up.

And even after Jesus died, rose again, and the Church was “born” on Pentecost, our spiritual homes continued to need remodeling time and time again. Jesus had promised that he would one day return, and the earliest followers were convinced Jesus would come back within a generation and would take up residence in the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. When the Romans destroyed that Temple (which ironically they helped expand a few decades earlier!) the followers of Jesus had to rebuild their spiritual home from the ground up once more, and rethink what it meant to follow Jesus in light of the fact that he wasn’t returning in their lifetime.

I could go on to talk about other major rebuilding projects throughout church history… the Roman Church that began to emerge after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches during the 11th century, the Reformation during the 16th century, the Methodist movement in the late 18th century, the Emerging church of the present day, the list goes on…

The point is that throughout the Biblical and Church history, God’s people are constantly embarking on these spiritual home improvement projects for one reason or another. Sometimes the project is embarked on voluntarily but far more often it is thrust upon the people involuntarily in response to changes in the surrounding culture at that particular time and place in history. The home improvement project is never accomplished easily; it often takes sweat, tears, and even blood to finish the project—inevitably some do not think we need to improve and they put up resistance. But in the end the home improvement eventually happens, and what usually emerges is a version of faith (in this case either Judaism or Christianity) that is stronger, more vibrant, and more diverse than the one it replaces[1].

In the case of my own individual faith, I certainly hope and pray that the faith that emerges from this involuntary spiritual remodeling project is stronger than the one it replaces. I suppose only time will tell…. But I pray I am willing to do my part to make it so, and that I will trust God to do the majority of the work in me.

The other night as I was rocking my daughter to bed, as I have done so many times in that dark nursery, I found myself thinking about what I’ve lived through the last couple of years and how it has fundamentally changed me. I’ve summarized some of my thoughts from that evening into a prayer below:

Lord, I want a faith that’s real; I want a faith that helps me deal with life as it really is, not as I wish it was. I don’t’ want to come to church on Sunday and deny the reality of the world around me the rest of the week. I don’t think that kind of faith is helpful… The fact is, life is sometimes very hard, and I need a faith that doesn’t flinch at dealing with life the way it really is.

I don’t want all of my focus to be on escaping this world and going to heaven when I die either; I want a faith that also helps me to make this world I live in a better place today. I want a faith that’s “big” enough to embrace the good… the bad…, and the ugly, which are all part of life on Earth… a faith that acknowledges that in our daily life we experience both the heights of joy and the depths of sorrow—sometimes virtually simultaneously… (If I have learned nothing else the past couple years, I know this to be true!)

The Jesus I see depicted in the Bible didn’t stay at arms-length from real life; he entered fully into the collective “mess” of human existence and by his sacrifice on the Cross, he offered hope that we could rise above that “mess.” He showed that even death itself could not stop God’s Kingdom from advancing. He tasked those who would follow after him to be a force for good in this world, working against the forces of evil that conspire to stop God’s dream from coming true. Jesus wanted us to bring light into the darkness of this planet, and to show the world that a different way of living was (and is) really possible and practical.

So that’s the kind of faith I think I want to have when this spiritual home improvement project is “complete”—whatever that means. I’m sure it’s easier to write it all on a piece of paper then it is to actually live it, but I figure I’ve got to start with a blueprint to guide my project. It may be modified as time goes on and the project progresses, but at least I have a starting point. I want to fully enter into life, fully engage it, and do my part to help the world (and especially the Church) become a better place for my being there… and do my part to help the world become all God intended it to be when he created it. In short, I want the phrase “I want to be like Jesus” to be more than a cliché on a wristband or T-shirt—I want it to describe my life.

May it be so for me… and may it be so for all of us.

[1] This paragraph is very similar to Phyllis Tickle’s thesis for her book entitled The Great Emergence. Tickle uses the term “rummage sale” to describe a phenomena that seems to happen every 500 years or so in Church history where major upheaval takes place, the church “gets rid” of some old things it no longer needs, and a new form of Christianity emerges that is eventually more vibrant than what it replaced—because it embraces both the old and the new forms.

Alan's observations and commentary are from the perspective of a pastor's husband, an interesting perspective to view local church life. He's paid to write about science for NASA, but his true passion is to use his writing to further God's kingdom. Many of his articles discuss aspects of discipleship and spiritual formation—in particular how our life experiences shape the person we become. Follow his blog: Alan's Corner.