changing on the inside

My neighbor across the way moved out a few weeks ago, and now the apartment is being readied for its next inhabitant. The outside remains the same, at least for now. But there is evidence of change happening inside – the old bathtub that laid in pieces until it was picked up for the trash, the men who pull into the parking lot each morning and begin unloading equipment, the thwack of staple guns and the loud buzzing of drills and electric saws that makes my thin windows tremble. This morning as I pulled out of the driveway I saw doors and drawers, re-painted and drying in the sun and wished for my own dingy apartment to undergo such a transformation. It’s aging, and old to me. The sink old and stained, grout between tiles is browned, the hardwood floors are scratched and stained. It is home, and comfortable, yes, but I feel the ways it is growing stale.

My friend, a homeowner, just finished a renovation on her kitchen. I saw its progress in quick visits: the preparation (a port-a-potty installed on their property), the excavation (walls came down), the slow build in all its dirt and raw wood (new foundation, bare wooden frames), and then, finally, the new surfaces, the finished space. She toured me when it was done. As I pulled open new drawers and cabinets and ran my hand over the cool, smooth black counter top, we recalled where the old pieces of the kitchen once stood – the sink was here, the wall there. The old room was difficult to remember now, with this new space so concrete and beautiful.

Soon after the renovation began, we mused together on the obvious metaphor of it: old becoming new, destruction and rebuilding. We both have felt it in our lives in one way or another. I remember her saying something about the nature of renovation and how it might have been so much easier to move somewhere new, undergo a complete change, leave the old behind. Who of us hasn’t been tempted to escape and start over? But then there’s the process of owning all of the aged parts of the life we’ve been given and invest in their re-making. This process is more difficult, in some ways – if we think about the renovations in our own hearts, it’s painful to excavate all of the dusty and dingy places we hide away in unknowable depths (how is it that our finite hearts never seem to run out of infinite pathways and places to store what we would rather forget?).

I have known this instinct. When I settled back into my old life after a few months in what felt like a new one, I very much wanted to buy that new house instead of renovating the old one. But then the old one embraced me – the old apartment, the old family, the old job, everything the same – and I have been receiving, slowly, the renovation of those deep places in my heart. I’m about to rebuild you is what the Spirit said to me in those early days, speaking from the book of Isaiah, even when I hadn’t yet experienced the worst of the battering storms that would un-do me on the inside.

I may not get to see what's changed inside the apartment across the way. Someone will. My new neighbor will know its newness under his feet and as he hangs old photos on its smooth white walls. 

in the long night season

I'm sitting on my couch. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the blinds lowered over the window. Except that they hang crooked. I can never seem to get them even. Those two strings never hold with the right amount of tension. The side that's higher lifts inches above the window sill. Beyond it, a small, insistent glow from the white Christmas lights I left strung around my porch peers through the dark night and into my window. Drops from the first (late) winter rain sit on the window. They catch its light and sparkle. The condensation blurs the edges. Around it all: night.

This is life right now: dark mornings, dark evenings, couch-sitting, small details, mundane details, crooked details that I still can't seem to get right after all these years. Tension held un-balanced. January is all about starting small, slow, silent, a stark contrast to the bright, fast, full December we just paraded through. Hopefully, it's about noticing, about keeping candles lit and lights glowing even if they're small, about the grace that holds a never balanced life -- still whole, and worth living.

These are the first attempts at creative words I've written in over a month. Of the many things I may have learned about myself over this past year, one is that words are hard-won is transition. The un-balance is weeks and months when my head is wrapping itself around how to live. I haven't yet learned to dig words out until I'm on the other side. Something else I've learned, or am learning, is how darkness creeps in after those large, bright full days are over until night is longer than day. But night seasons are part of how the world moves and spins, how it turns over, part of the creation God called "good" (is what my pastor said yesterday, and I am trying to believe him).

Or maybe this is the way I am supposed to write it: after many long nights, day will always become longer than night, and something brighter than twinkling Christmas lights will announce itself through the cracks in my crooked blinds. I'm sitting here. I'm waiting.

[If you are reading, thanks for joining me here. I may or may not be adding more words in the coming weeks... stay tuned.]

photo: sunrise at griffith park