Beautiful Things

Yes, I know...it's been awhile; but Chad is killing me - literally.  Okay well maybe not literally; but I feel like it sometimes. :)  I have dug 41 post-holes, set 41 posts, dug a 50' trench and cleared out 20' of woods.  I'm pathetic, I'm covered in bruises and burns (post-hole diggers and I don't get along) and I'm exhausted.  So when we are done for the night it takes all I have to put some semblance of a meal together for my children, shower them and get them to bed.  I then proceed to collapse and not move until 7am the next day.  So stringing sentences together to form thoughts and thus a blog has not been on my radar.  The only reason I can function this afternoon is because friends came to help and rescued me.  (That might sound a bit dramatic but I definitely feel 'rescued!')  Many hands make for light work (or whatever that old saying is that my grandmother used to say) and I am so very thankful for the 'many hands' today!  When they left this afternoon Chad and I looked at each other and said, "we'd have killed each other if we'd had to do that!" 

I'm whining, I realize it; but between tubing at the lake this past week and digging a trench muscles, hurt that I never knew existed.  It's good for me; and both let me know I'm alive, and leave me thankful to still be alive when they're done. 

These jobs have been messy.  Like mud-caked-on-shoes-dirt-smeared-all-over-faces-can't-find-a-clean-spot-on-me kind of messy.  Dirt and mud don't bother me, I guess that's a side-effect of growing up with brothers; I actually kind of like it.  I tried to get Malachi and Silas to play with some of the mud with me but they looked at me like I was crazy and after a few 'squishes' in their hands they both had a minor freak-out moment because their hands were dirty.  They've got a lot to learn...

...but so do I.   After one particularly messy afternoon we were spraying off our tools and our shoes with the hose; I seized the moment and sprayed Chad with the hose and slung mud at him from my caked shoe.  Since he hates cold water you can imagine how well that went over.  I said I was just trying to help; but he wasn't buying.  However, learning self control to not spray my husband with the hose isn't the lesson I need to learn.  That same mud-slinging afternoon we made one of our numerous treks to Lowe's and heard Gungor's Beautiful Things on the radio. There I sat covered in 'dust' listening to the words "you make beautiful things out of the dust" and I was overwhelmingly at peace.  

"Yes! Yes!" I wanted to scream.  Life is messy and oftentimes leaves us caked in dirt and sweat with bruises and scars that tell where we've been;but that's not the end.  Because of the cross "He makes beautiful things out of the dust...out of us."  He is making us new - He is doing a new thing.  

I pray this is encouragement for whatever mess of life you find yourself in.  God isn't discouraged and disheartened by the mess.  He knows what he's doing; and he is making a beautiful thing.  

"Forget the former things; see I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." Isaiah 43:18-19