Makeover

My hands throbbed, my fingers got swollen and my back ached.  No, I wasn’t sick.  Just my old body feeling the effects of hard physical labour, something I have not engaged in for the past decade.
The first thing I did right after my retirement after retrenchment was pick up the broom and mop.  I think I make a better maid than the Indonesian 'ibu'  we used to call in to clean house twice a month.  For starters I do it free of charge, plus I do it more often and more thoroughly  than them.  I am ashamed to admit some parts of the house have never been cleaned ever since my husband's passing some 17 years ago.  Like the store room.  Every year I would resolve to clearing and cleaning it.  Year after year, it remained just that – a resolution.

Well,  finally I did it -  in 1 day.  I simply threw out all the boxes of books,  toys and everything from yester-years which nobody had touched since they were chucked in there.  The salvageable stuff came up to 150 kg,  which earned me $50 from the old-newspaper collector, a tidy reward for all the sweat I put in. Now the store is suddenly so spacious - I can actually walk into it.  I am reminded how it’s so obvious we have to discard all the old stuff in our lives to free up space for new things. I am sure many of us have a lot of ‘old baggage’ that needs throwing away. Problem is we never quite get down to it.  Some in fact prefer to cling onto all the dust and dirt of the past for whatever reason and are not really interested in the ‘off with the old, on with the new’ refrain.   Sure, we can find a thousand and one (seemingly justifiable, even good) excuses but it's a no-brainer if we don't get rid of the old clutter taking up all the space, there will never be any room for other/new things  – obviously I am not talking about just cupboards, shelves or stores here.  Sometimes we end up missing the best, just like how it was when not many bothered to make room for Jesus when He decided to come down to earth. How much we lose when we are stuffed so full of ourselves, we have no room for God to dwell in.

The store was only for starters. Next project was the garden,  or rather the jungle in front of and behind the house. I have grand plans to turn the wilderness into an Eden -  flowers in front and
vegetables at the back. But first I had to fork out $700 for 3 guys to chop off all the trees and shrubs that have been towering up so very well year after year, to the extent that I have got young saplings growing from the top of the rear roof gutters. Yes, trees were growing from my roof, and the roots were creeping over into my neighbour’s side, something she had already alerted me about very politely some time back. I don’t think she will be that polite anymore if I still don’t do anything about it.  The guys took barely 2 hours with a power chain-saw .  I took  7 days,  sitting on an upside-down flower pot,  clearing the drains,  picking and pulling at the weeds and grass. And that's only the front plot.  I haven't started on the back portion yet.

 
Sweating it out daily,  I learnt a life lesson about roots.  What seemed just a little inconsequential blade of grass can be attached so tenaciously to invisible roots that spread far,  wide and deep into  the ground. I pull at one and find it's connected to another bigger root that's connected to another and yet another. There's a whole network of very much alive roots underneath the soil that's unseen. I tear, pull, slice, and hack at the mass (mess), till my trusty 20 year old shears can no longer cut properly. Man, those roots were stubborn. And I get to thinking how the Bible talks about roots that spring up and cause trouble.

How many roots we all have buried deep inside us that need to be removed.  Diseased roots of bitterness/unforgiveness that make body and soul sick.  Dying or dead roots of faithlessness that once believed in God. Ugly roots of sin that block us from experiencing and/or communing with a holy God.  And just like the roots that run so deep in my garden,  invisible roots are so deeply embedded in the soil of human hearts,  that many don't even realise how they bind us up  inside in knots. Some choose to deny or ignore them, mostly  because it's just too painful and takes too much effort to tear them out.

For there is no short-cut – they must be forcibly torn out. I remember how my husband would painstakingly  use  a screw-driver to manually dig up clumps of cow-grass before pulling them out. Expert gardeners tell me I must tackle the roots  thoroughly before I can  plant any other thing successfully.  Otherwise they will sprout and grow to overwhelm other plants by 'stealing' soil nutrients away.  Sounds so like how the devil comes to steal kill and destroy man who were 'planted'  on planet earth to bear good fruit.  Bad roots are bad news. 

I saw in the  garden I had neglected over the years a prophetic picture of my own household.  So I fought those roots every morning.  It became a battle not just to physically clear a plot of land,  but to deal with all the twisted roots that had crept into and wrapped themselves around the hearts of my family.  It gave me a lot of satisfaction yanking them out physically and by prophetic extension spiritually.  To finish off the job,  I sprayed just a little  weed-killer over stubborn spots,  being alerted of its potency.  Applying it  reminded me of the all-sufficient power of the blood of Christ to remove once and for all every root that defiles my household garden.

By now I knew  this was my season of getting foundational things right with God, if I wanted to see the breakthrough I had been praying so long for my family.  And He wasn't stopping at the garden. I  left the ground to lie fallow for some days to get rid of the weed-killer effect, but in the meanwhile God set me up for another big task - to repaint the exterior wall.  No contractor wanted to quote me,  because it was just too small an area of work. So I had to DIY. By the time I finished scraping off peeling paint and black mouldy spots, scrubbing and washing off the entire wall,  I felt as if I had no arms left. And I hadn’t even started on putting on sealant and a new coat of paint.

Of course God had an object lesson in there somewhere for me.  Every blemish on the ‘wall’  of our lives must be scraped off totally clean in preparation for God Himself to paint on it anew.  If all it took me was  2 cans of chemically-laden liquid to make an old wall look good again,  imagine what my Creator God who paints every sun-rise, sunset and rainbow, who hangs every star and cloud in the heavens, who put colour into every flower and shades the waters of rivers and oceans...what a master-piece He can paint on the wall of my – nay, of every – life. But first the wall must be prepared to come under the scrapper, to be scrubbed hard, washed, wiped down thoroughly and finally to submit to being painted over.  Just as we can’t simply brush on new paint on an uncleansed wall, likewise God won’t draw on the dirty mouldy canvasses of human lives, blackened by sin.  It’s up to us whether we want to put ourselves in His hands to do what only He can do – clean us up and make us His beautiful work of art.

I haven’t finished with the garden. In fact I expect to be sweating over it continually and continuously, motivated by a desire to make it beautiful and useful, so that it doesn’t degenerate into just a ‘jungly’ mess of weeds and creepers.   I anticipate the pleasure of seeing it bloom well, even if it means throbbing hands, swollen fingers and aching back. The pain is worth it.


Come to think of it, I am so glad my God is also in the business of making human lives bloom. Indeed Jesus  is the master Gardener; He has already expended His all – literally blood, sweat and tears - through dying on the cross , so that every life can grow into its maximum potential of beauty and function – as He designed it to be, simply because He loves us.





“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins…”
 – Luke 5:37-38