What Will Be

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In the home where Jared and I are going to live after we’re married, there is a step ladder in the middle of the living room. There’s a thick layer of dust on the floors, tools on the kitchen counters, missing toilet seats, and old bedsheets in the bathtub because that seemed like the cleanest place to put them. The house is mostly empty, save for a weird assortment of renovation tools and antiques we’ve found: paint trays on the record player, pry bars and hammers on an old quilt in the bedroom. I bought a wooden kitchen chair with an embroidered seat that’s sitting forlorn in the middle of the construction.

I am constantly amazed how unconcerned I am with the mess of this process—amazed because scrubbing the floor behind the toilet has never been a great joy of mine. But it’s different when the place is yours, isn’t it? 

My brother and his wife bought a 100-year-old home before they got married last summer, and they loved it back to life, meaning they just about stripped it to the bone. Floors, walls, halls, stairwells, and chimneys were sanded, taped, scraped, painted, and cleared of the bats that lived there before they did. The back porch coupled as a station for the chop saws. While we worked, we’d hang our coats on a paint scaffold in the kitchen. Joel moved in a few weeks before the wedding, and I marveled at how he could live in the middle of such a mess. How can you feel at home when the sofa is out in the workshop and the oven is on the back porch?

Jared and I will sometimes sit in the wicker chairs on our own back porch, the house behind us still stripped and dirty, and I think I understand. When the place is your own, you can see past what it is to what it will become. It occurs to me that this is how the Lord sees us—not just what we are now, but the glorified saints we’ll someday be. 

In the meantime, the work of renovation or sanctification is as much a tearing out of what was as it is a building of what will be. I think it’s funny how, at the end of the day, the house can look far more strewn apart than it did at the beginning—the floors bare concrete and rolls of carpet thrown out into the front yard—and yet our response is, “Doesn’t it look so much better?”

This is renovation, and it is also love. 

Love builds things by tearing out the old to make space for the new. Among the wreckage of our sinful hearts, the Lord God is working all that is into all that will be, and I pray this will not just be the process of renovating our home, but of sanctifying our marriage, too.

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