The Remodel

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”  Revelation 21:5

A few years ago, we had a water line break in our home. We were out of town at the time and got a phone call from a neighbor telling us that there was water running out from under our garage door. This water line was in an upstairs bathroom and must have run for days, causing damage to basement, main floor, and upstairs. It was a mess. We salvaged what we could, moving everything into a storage container while the place had to be gutted. Insurance covered some, but not all, of the remodel, which took months. At the time it seemed like it was a lot of work, but in the end we had something profoundly better than before.

We’d been wanting to remodel and make some major changes for a while. We’d not yet been willing to pull the trigger on the project though. It was costly, it would take a lot of time, and it would be a tremendous amount of work. Frankly, our home wasn’t in that bad of shape and so the pain and cost of remodeling was too much – until the water line broke and things were so bad that we had no other option.

This mirrors my addiction. In my drug use, I wanted a new, sober life. I understood though what it would cost me to get there: confession, treatment, radical life changes. Those things were just too expensive, and my life wasn’t that bad, so I stayed stuck where I was. It wasn’t until my life fell apart that I became willing to embrace drastic, painful transformation. Now, my life is profoundly better, but I couldn’t choose change until my old life got so bad that I couldn’t stand it any longer.

A lot of us have found ourselves here. God is in the business of transformation. In today’s passage, we’re told that he makes all things new. We’re fundamentally broken and God desires to heal us in a loving relationship with him. In theory, we want our lives to be better. We know they could be. But we also know what it may cost to get there. So, we refuse God’s transformation because our lives just aren’t that bad yet. We remain stuck in the old ways, never experiencing the life, joy, peace, and meaning for which we were created. To us, God is calling. Daily, he asks that we follow him to the new life. It may be scary and it may mean sacrifice, but that which we gain in the new life infinitely outweighs any loss of the old life.