Under Construction

That's my net-covered hotel on the left.

On a recent stay in New York City, I glanced out my Upper West Side hotel window and saw the effects of progress.

It wasn’t pretty.

Actually, it was downright ugly.

From the inside, the view was bad.

From the street? Even worse.

Scaffolding stretched skyward like a metal skeleton.

Netting blanketed the area, trying in vain to hide the mess.

Progress, it turns out, is not always aesthetically pleasing.

More often than not, it looks like work.

Hard, inconvenient, messy work.

But the “work” is what caught my attention.

Random observations like this tend to pull me into deeper waters.

I wondered: What are they doing out there?

Fixing the façade? Treating for termites? Just cleaning windows?

View from my room. Lovely, huh?

Whatever the project, it was clear that SOMETHING was happening.

Outsiders, like me, can guess, but we don’t know.

Only the crew inside the barriers have the complete picture.

They’re the ones with the plans.

They’re the ones doing the work, the grimy, noisy, and expensive work.

The kind of work that disrupts everything before it restores anything.

And just like that, I realized I wasn’t really thinking about the hotel anymore.

I was thinking about us.

You. Me. All of us.

Because the truth is, most progress doesn’t look like progress while it’s happening.

It looks like scaffolding.

It looks like boundaries and prayer and therapy and breakdowns and rebuilding.

It looks like silence and withdrawal and tears and a to-do list that no one else can see.

It looks, frankly, like a mess.

From the outside, people may wonder what’s going on.

They may offer unsolicited guesses.

Then again, they may not notice at all.

But we know.

We know what’s under construction.

We know the weight of what we’re carrying.

We know the parts of our lives that need gutting and Grace.

And when the tarp finally comes down, no one else will really understand whether we were just washing windows or saving our structure from killer termites.

But we know.

More importantly, He knows.

May God guide the work in us, visible and invisible, so that the lives we’re building reflect not just our strength but His direction.

Even if it gets a little ugly in the process. Well… especially if it gets ugly.