When cabinets go bad

We are redoing our kitchen. We need new cabinets. The cabinets that we have are original to the house and they are literally falling apart. They are made of particle board, which are chips of wood glued together. Time and water have caused the particle board to literally come apart in chunks in places. The problem is, you can’t just replace the parts of the cabinets that are coming apart. Plus you can’t save the tile counter tops on top of the cabinets. It is the domino effect - when you start to fix one thing, you impact another thing that needs to be fixed, which impacts yet another thing that needs to be fixed, and so on and so on. Think of the movie, The Money Pit.

Here are some spiritual lessons from this:

1. Change is stressful. Even if it is change for the better. Redoing your kitchen cabinets looks like a great time on HGTV (the home and garden network), but so far all it makes me is tired and grumpy. So too with changes in our life, especially when it comes to character issues. It sounds great when you read about it. Actually doing it is a lot of hard work.

2. Demo leaves a big mess. We hauled everything out of the kitchen and piled it up on the driveway to be hauled off to the dump. The pile is huge and ugly. You can make the spiritual connection.

3. Things look much worse before they get better. Ripping out the cabinets exposed some nasty stuff that was underneath the cabinets. The Bible makes a contrast between living in the light and living in the darkness. There are times we need bring areas of our life into the light.

4. The domino effect is brutal. When you fix one thing, you can see the thing next to it needs attention as well. It is easier and cheaper in the long run if you fix it now as opposed to later. The same is true spiritually.

5. Someday it will be worth it. It sure doesn’t feel like it right now staring at the bills. But someday it will be worth fixing. So too with your life.

There is a joke about polishing the front door knob of where you life. It starts with a warning not to polish the front door knob, because if you do, you will notice that the door needs to be painted. And if you paint the door……

Let encourage you to do it anyway. Clean up one aspect of your life. Then see what happens. Someday it will be worth it.

A taste, but more work needed

I have project car that I am working on that is not happy. It is beyond simply being not happy. It is an angry beast. Every time I walk it the man cave (my garage) the thing sneers at me. If it could talk it would curse. And spit. It is a 1972 Capri, which most people today have no idea what that is, but I had one just like it when I was in high school. There is nothing special about these cars. They are not collectable. However, nostalgia got the best of me when I bought another one thirty some years later. I remembered all the reasons why I liked and the disliked the car and then sold it. But somewhere in the back of a grown man’s mind still reside the hopes and dreams of what you wanted to do to that first car but never had the money to do it. I wanted to drop a V8 into it. So I bought another one and headed in that direction, but found out that money is just tight now as it was way back then. And now time is ticking faster as well. So I sold the second one, vowing not to go down this road again.

Then came the call. A man who had one of these cars that already had a V8 in it was selling his, and wanted to know if I wanted it. I had been asking him to sell it to me for well over a year. I had wanted this car for the drive train to put in the body of the second one, but I had already sold that it. And I had made the vow. Besides, this car by had issues. It had dents, it had rust, the interior was trashed. It was not a car that would be easy to bring back. Even the monster engine in the car was running rough. So I told the seller, “No thanks.”

That should have been the end of it, but…well….it wasn’t. I called him back a few hours later and told him I would buy it.

Over the years I have learned the hard way not to buy a car sight unseen. And yet that was what I just did. When I did see it in person a few weeks later only confirmed I should have looked at it first. It was worth the price. But the car indeed had issues. The deeper I dug, the more issues I found. This was going to be a challenge.

You may know where I am going with this. We are all like this car to some extent. We have dents, rust, areas of our life that are trashed, and last but not least, have issues. Because we do, life can at times be a challenge.

Like the car, we have times were we are not happy. We are angry. We sneer at others. We even curse. But we have someone who is working in our life that can see beyond that. He can see the potential of our becoming what we were designed to be. And he rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty in our lives. You know his name.

Tonight I took the angry beast of a car on its first trip to the back country roads of East San Diego County - a place that doesn’t know what flat or straight means. With the interior gutted and the wiring hanging everywhere, it rattled like crazy. No carpet or insulation meant searing floorboard temperatures. And running ragged as it was, the engine and exhaust smells were not pleasant.

But all that said, there were a few minutes of glory. There was a moment where the road I was on broke free from civilization and pointed east toward the back country hills and canyons. It was at that moment the car sensed something lay ahead…maybe not today..but in the days to come. I hit the gas. The engine roared. For a few brief moments we were off and running. Thrilling is too weak a word. Then I let off the throttle, turned around and headed home. More work will be needed before we can go further.

You can make the connection. Soon there will be a moment like that in your life. You can sense something is ahead. Something good. Something you were created for. And for a few brief moments you can taste it. More work will be needed before you can go further. But at least you got a taste.

It is coming. And coming soon.

A taste, but more work needed

I have project car that I am working on that is not happy. It is beyond simply being not happy. It is an angry beast. Every time I walk it the man cave (my garage) the thing sneers at me. If it could talk it would curse. And spit. It is a 1972 Capri, which most people today have no idea what that is, but I had one just like it when I was in high school. There is nothing special about these cars. They are not collectable. However, nostalgia got the best of me when I bought another one thirty some years later. I remembered all the reasons why I liked and the disliked the car and then sold it. But somewhere in the back of a grown man’s mind still reside the hopes and dreams of what you wanted to do to that first car but never had the money to do it. I wanted to drop a V8 into it. So I bought another one and headed in that direction, but found out that money is just tight now as it was way back then. And now time is ticking faster as well. So I sold the second one, vowing not to go down this road again.

Then came the call. A man who had one of these cars that already had a V8 in it was selling his, and wanted to know if I wanted it. I had been asking him to sell it to me for well over a year. I had wanted this car for the drive train to put in the body of the second one, but I had already sold that it. And I had made the vow. Besides, this car by had issues. It had dents, it had rust, the interior was trashed. It was not a car that would be easy to bring back. Even the monster engine in the car was running rough. So I told the seller, “No thanks.”

That should have been the end of it, but…well….it wasn’t. I called him back a few hours later and told him I would buy it.

Over the years I have learned the hard way not to buy a car sight unseen. And yet that was what I just did. When I did see it in person a few weeks later only confirmed I should have looked at it first. It was worth the price. But the car indeed had issues. The deeper I dug, the more issues I found. This was going to be a challenge.

You may know where I am going with this. We are all like this car to some extent. We have dents, rust, areas of our life that are trashed, and last but not least, have issues. Because we do, life can at times be a challenge.

Like the car, we have times were we are not happy. We are angry. We sneer at others. We even curse. But we have someone who is working in our life that can see beyond that. He can see the potential of our becoming what we were designed to be. And he rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty in our lives. You know his name.

Tonight I took the angry beast of a car on its first trip to the back country roads of East San Diego County - a place that doesn’t know what flat or straight means. With the interior gutted and the wiring hanging everywhere, it rattled like crazy. No carpet or insulation meant searing floorboard temperatures. And running ragged as it was, the engine and exhaust smells were not pleasant.

But all that said, there were a few minutes of glory. There was a moment where the road I was on broke free from civilization and pointed east toward the back country hills and canyons. It was at that moment the car sensed something lay ahead…maybe not today..but in the days to come. I hit the gas. The engine roared. For a few brief moments we were off and running. Thrilling is too weak a word. Then I let off the throttle, turned around and headed home. More work will be needed before we can go further.

You can make the connection. Soon there will be a moment like that in your life. You can sense something is ahead. Something good. Something you were created for. And for a few brief moments you can taste it. More work will be needed before you can go further. But at least you got a taste.

It is coming. And coming soon.