Bonica Bud and Pickett Fence

 

“Nothing is perfect.”

Those words cut me. They always have. I don’t care if they’re true because everything in me wants them to be untrue. Everything in me longs for perfection though perfect is as cold and distant as the morning star.

Yet here is the lesson I keep learning over and over again: when perfection falls to earth it veils its light in imperfection.

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This house is my perfect dream come true, but Lord-have-mercy it is a mess.

Half the windows can’t be opened, whole chunks of molding are missing near the roofline, there is an ominous bulge in the plaster wall along the stairs, and please do watch your step on the porch. You never know when your foot might crash right through.

I wrote these words in Roots and Sky, though I did not know how true they would become:

“… I picture this house, this hilltop, cracked open. Torn right open. And everyone invited to come in. In this picture, it seems that something precious has been emptied out and is being passed around. It is a frightening, exhilarating vision.”

The thing about a broken, imperfect house is that we cannot live in it alone.

When I met Dr. B (“doctor of old houses”), he told me he had prayed God would bring him another old house to work on.

When I called J about our windows and gave him my name, we both held our phones in a state of shock. Apparently, he had purchased Roots and Sky for his wife only the day before.

Jonathan and I always hoped that this place would be a blessing for many beyond our own immediate family. We glimpsed how that could be true our very first Easter when one hundred neighbors joined us to hunt eggs on the lawn. We sent those invitations to a neighborhood of strangers because we were lonely.

I called these local craftsmen because our house is broken.

Perfectly, beautifully broken.

 

Praise be to God for broken houses, broken hearts, broken bodies, and all the other precious broken things.

Praise be to God for hands that heal and hands that make things beautiful and whole.

 

New Dawn Rose

Queen of Sweden Rose

American Beauty Climbing Rose

 

Praise be to God for roses.

Praise be to God for thorns.

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