Now, before I discuss this, I should say that I am not a fan of roofs. I do not go on roofs. I did not want to go on the roof job, and that is probably precisely why God sent me there. Yes, God sent me to The Roof. (And yes, it is a proper noun...) The Roof was in Pascagoula, and in this case, we did not get to meet the homeowners: it was much more focused on the manual labor--and trust me, this was labor. Intense heat somehow gets worse when you are 12-20 feet off the ground and dealing with shingles... The tar on the back of the shingles was so hot that we had to be sure not to turn them up the right way until we were ready to place them, because they would start sticking to the "felt" paper and rip up little pieces of it.
However, we did some amazing work, working informally in pairs on both sides of the roof at the same time, some with nails and hammers, some with nail guns. We made ridiculously good progress, right up until the moment when we ran out of supplies. It turned out that someone had incorrectly measured the roof and thus ordered the wrong amount of supplies for the job. So we were suddenly stuck without materials. We made the proper phone calls, and took a break for lunch while waiting for the supplies to arrive. That turned out to be a much longer wait than we anticipated; like, three hours worth of waiting.
That was frustrating. We feel confident that we could have finished the job today had we only had what we needed. We would have liked for things to have gone differently. We would have liked to have all the supplies we needed, or to have them delivered more quickly. We would have liked to have finished the job so we could tackle something new tomorrow.
But we are not in charge.
God is.
We used our time to protect our bodies, by drinking water, eating lunch, and resting. Some of us took naps. Some of us bumped a volleyball around, other flipped a frisbee around. We listened to music, sang out loud with some of it, and played several rounds of Bananagrams. (You'll have to look that one up.) But most of all, we continued to work on relationships, to share what God has been doing in our lives.
And God has indeed been working in our lives. For myself, he has revealed all kinds of things within my heart that should not be there. I've found that there are areas of life where I am selfish, areas of life where I am covetous, areas where I am jealous, and areas where I try to take possession of things that are not mine--stealing.
This is hard to deal with. I like to think of myself as a nice person. I like for OTHER people to think of me as a nice person. And that is something I can do most of the time: I am warm enough, friendly enough, accommodating enough that most people I meet like me sufficiently well. And I get the label of being a "good person." But God is not interested in making me a nice person. God is interested in refining my character, to make me a loving, compassionate person NOT JUST when other people are looking, or when other people are nice to me, or when I've had enough sleep, or when I feel like life is fair...
I don't know where this will lead me. I only know that as God places these things on my heart, it is my job to acknowledge what He is telling me and to be open with Him and give Him permission to change me. The changing work itself is up to Him. I know I can be "confident of this, that he who began a good work in [me] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."
Amen and amen, Lord. Do your work in me.
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