Katie lived in an ugly little shack. It was an 8’ x 12’ wood frame structure, on a concrete slab, with plywood walls and a steel roof. Inside, the walls were simply foam insulation covered with blue plastic sheets. The building had doors, windows, a wood stove and partial wiring, but the walls were neither square nor plum. Sometimes the joints would be off by inches. The house was riddled with mice that could be heard running through the plastic sheets overhead.
The best thing would simply have been to tear the shed down and start over, except for the fact that Katie didn’t have money for a brand-new structure. This was her house. This was the place where she lived. The only way she could afford improvements was for the workmen to tinker a bit here and there over the course of years.
House builder Thomas Elpel worked his way through the shed from the outside in. He put chicken wire up against the outside wall and stuccoed over it to give the house texture. He moved another building close enough to use as a bathroom. He covered the inside walls with 1x4 planking. It took years, but over that time the building changed from a dilapidated old shed into a very serviceable little house.
We also are a dilapidated old property. But when we give God permission to start working on us, he picks up his trowel and begins to rebuild from the inside out. In Romans 12:2 Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what [is] that good, acceptable and perfect will of God.”
You are your own work project. You decide what the house of yourself will become. Will you live your life for the things of earth and time – things that wear out, grow old and fade away? Or will you allow God to re-create you from the inside out, one step at a time over the course of years. It is during this life on earth that we begin growing toward the person we will become in eternity.
So, what are you building? Who are you becoming? Do you want to live eternity as the person you are growing into? We all start out as a dilapidated old shack but through Christ we will be transformed into something better.