When my wife, Carol, first fell in love with our house it was from 800 miles away over the internet. She loved the big wrap around porch, the openness and flow from the kitchen to the living area, but mostly, she loved the age. You see, she has a thing for old houses. Our house on Park Street is deeded in 1920, but very likely could be a bit older than that.
Over the few years we’ve lived here we’ve renovated nearly the entire house. We’ve touched up walls, ran new plumbing to the bathrooms, and changed as much as the old knob and tube wiring as we could get our hands on. But as much as we have done, it wasn’t until this last Wednesday that our house achieved a milestone it hasn’t seen since the day it was built. Big news, folks, our house now has 1 level floor!
Now, we certainly aren’t living on dramatic slopes, and in many cases it’s hardly noticeable at all, but the moment my daughter puts her ball on the ground and it starts to roll to the middle of the house you know it’s true. Although every floor has its imperfections, the floor in our mudroom has always been significantly worse than the rest (it drops 4+ inches over 10 feet!). The result is everything in the room from cleaning supplies to shoes resting against the lower wall. So, fed up, I grabbed a couple saws and a sledgehammer, and I did something about it. I used a laser level, and I built 1 level floor.
After I built the new floor my wife simply responded, “I had no idea it was that bad.” And that’s the thing about living with imperfect floors. You can get used to them. You can even get to the point where you hardly notice the imperfections at all.
The same thing is true with our world, isn’t it? It’s so imperfect and broken that we can’t picture it another way. We hear of the atrocities happening in Syria and Egypt, and they don’t even surprise us. We resign ourselves to the notion that more lives will be claimed in the violence. That’s just the way it is. We know the statistics about hunger and poverty, perhaps you’re experiencing them. We know what it’s like to lose a life-long friend over a quarrel, and what’s it’s like to watch our mistakes haunt us. That’s life. We live in a fallen world, and we contribute to it.
But know this: God wants another way for us. If we can’t spend another minute living in an imperfect house, how much more urgently must God want to make things right with his world? He once spoke his desire through the prophet Isaiah, saying, “I will make justice the plumb-line and righteousness the plumb-bob” (Isaiah 28:17). Who needs a laser level when you’ve got justice and righteousness helping us see what is good and what is right?
Let’s face it, one level floor in a five bedroom house isn’t a lot. But it is a start. We live in an imperfect world, but God is doing something about it. So don’t look at the injustice around you today, and accept it as reality. But be the plumb-line of justice and make one level floor, as God’s plumb-bob of righteousness makes us right with him through Christ. Amen.