Stripping Down

Today, we finished mucking out Bret's house. I was sent up to the attic to remove the final slabs of insulating. As I finished stripping the insulation from the heating ducts, I thought of how "this is the end." As NIck & I demolished the last piece in removing the stairs to the attic, I thought, "Wow, this place is stripped."
What had once been Bret's home, was now a shell of a building. No sinks, no showers, no drywall, no carpet. Just a shell-- stripped, vulnerable and barren.
But that's not the end of the story.
When I finished the attic, the entire group joined in on the clean-up effort. Then finally after sweeping clean the inside, we were finished.
We were finished "preparing hope" for the next family/people who would purchase this home from Bret.
What had been one person's shell of hoplessness, might one day become a great potential for hope & new life for the next inhabbitor.
I thank God for stripping down.
I thank God for stripping me down of my anxieties & prejudices of living with peolpe (few of whom I'd met) for two weeks. God has given me great & new friendships & strengthened old ones.
I thank God for stripping away my perceptions of what is or is not being done down here in "The Big Easy." God has given me the strength & faith to re-submit my papers to Chicago, so that I may submit the Gulf Coast as a perference, especially Disaster Response.
Finally, I thank God for stripping me daily of my sins, my shortcomings, and my growing edges.
Daily God strips me of what I thought I knew as "enough," and provides me with more knowledge, more faith, and more growth.
If only stripping down didn't seem quite so depressing or lonely, maybe we could all enjoy the potential in our lives for God to reconstruct new hope in our hearts, where we once thought nothing else could be done.

Stripping pipes for Jesus,
Adam F.