Uprooted

Like the rest of this nation's infrastructure, our local roads and walkways are crumbling.

Our city has decided that it will provide one final round of publically funded sidewalk repair. Once such work is completed, it will become the individual home owner's responsiblity to maintain and repair the public sidewalks that run through their property.

.....but alas, this post is not a rant about sidewalk repair.

No dear Reader, this post is all about jackhammered concrete, the scarred earth and a tree's shattered roots.

For three days now, I've watched the same pair of day-glo orange suited city workers as they've rent, and torn, and ultimately repaired the sidewalk outside our dining room window. I've heard the shrill whine of concrete cutters, felt the heavy pounding of jackhammers, and I've watched as backhoes savaged the dark, wet earth, uprooting everything and sparing nothing.

Perhaps I'm just a hormonal mess, or maybe I am prone to reading more into events than I should, but I have become acutely aware of how desperately I resist this age old process of destruction and repair in my own life.

Suspend reality for moment and just imagine that my marital life is like a sidewalk. Everything my husband and I have done, the home we've established, the children we've raised, the love we've shared...just imagine that everything we are as husband and wife has been cemented together to form a literal, physical pathway that runs though the known world. This "marital sidewalk" functions to provide a safe and convenient path for my husband and I, for our children, and for our family and our friends to move back and forth between our personal and collective relationships.

...and sometimes our marital sidewalk, just like our neighborhood sidewalk, is subject to both the seen and the unseen forces that can erode, even destroy the pathway that we've so carefully established. Just like a regular sidewalk, a marital sidewalk can begin to buckle, to crack and to fall apart. When this happens (and it always does to some degree), the marital sidewalk becomes unsafe, so much so, that people begin to step around the marital sidewalk, and relationships suffer.

At some point, it becomes necessary to tear up the layers of a marital sidewalk. Cracked cement must be jackhammered away before the backhoes can move in to lift the broken concrete slabs. It's dirty work, as shattered roots emerge from the torn soil, leaving both marital partners feeling vulnerable and exposed.

Speaking from experience, it sucks to have a jackhammer and backhoe tear away the concrete of my own perceptions. It sucks to expose the shattered roots of my self-serving judgements and fears. And yet, as we all know, nothing lasts forever. Everything that isn't repaired or rebuilt, is simply thrown away.

I suppose that's why I'm in love with a God who's in the restoration business. In God's economy, nothing is thrown away because every living thing, every person, every relationship has value.

Ultimately, I think this is why I am willing to invest in the sidewalks of my life. Each person I know, every relationship I experience has value, immeasurable value. We are not throw-a-way people you and I. You are worthwhile. I am worthwhile. I choose to believe that our lives have meaning.

OK.

I think I'm done now.

Rant over.