What do you think of when you think of maintenance? A car possibly, a house? Does your heart come to mind? And I don’t mean the actual medical health of your heart (though that’s important for sure!), but I mean the emotional, spiritual health.
Your heart, your families hearts…..maintenance of any kind takes effort.
This summer we had several major “maintenance” things we had to take care of and still need taken care of actually! We built the home we currently live in about 13 years ago – most of the work we did ourselves – albeit with the help of a lot of family and friends! It’s the 2nd home we’ve built, our first was right before we got married. Now before you go thinking we are super wealthy, let me give some perspective. My husband had worked and saved a bunch while he was in high school, he purchased land when it was not quite so crazy priced, he sold his calf horse to pay cash for our foundation, my wedding ring came from a saddle he traded to the pawn shop, and his dad as well as family on my side have construction backgrounds.
Then after about 5 years we sold our first home, then purchased a little more land and moved into a single wide trailer for about 9 years – a very old single wide trailer! During that time we fenced and built our barn, arena, all that kind of stuff. Then when the mice and finally a snake wanted to move into our trailer, and we could no longer keep them out, we built the home we are currently in. Again…..with a lot of family and friend help.
So we are well versed in projects of all kinds……but this summer especially, as every time we turned around there was another maintenance issue needing taken care of, it can kind of wear on you! And these were not even because we had ignored regular maintenance, these were the “just because things happen” type things.
What I’m getting at….is maintenance, long term and daily, takes a lot out of a person. Physically, mentally, financially. It’s much more fun to see the completed brand new project than fix up the old one. Or how about vehicles? Way more fun to get a new one than spend money on repairs. And a clean house and kitchen – lovely right?! But the daily keeping it up…..a major chore!
So many times in my life I’ve chucked what is old in order to buy new. And sometimes maybe that is the very best option! about 16 years ago we had a finnicky lawn mower, one day it was up to it’s old tricks and Dusty (my husband) told Tucker and I (he was 1 at the time) to get in the truck, we were headed to town. We went straight to the lawn mower dealership and bought a brand new mower (on payments mind you – which I’m not recommending!). This was not characteristic of my husband….like not at all…..but he was ready for one thing in his life to fire up and work when he turned it on! Crazily enough, that exact same lawn mower helped our boys last year as they started their mowing business before they purchased their own equipment, and it is still our lawn mower that we use today….16 years later!
And what about the picture in this post? That is an example of the lack of a little maintenance. We purchased this trailer knowing it was a major “fixer upper”. It had been parked and basically not moved or even gotten into in approx 13 years. There was a vent that had a crack in it on top of the trailer from a tree or branch falling on it, otherwise the trailer was closed up. From years of having that broken out vent, the inside was completely ruined. This was a very nice trailer at one time, but zero maintenance over the years led to complete destruction. There were literally thousands (and I’m not joking) of mud dopper nests everywhere…..even behind the walls and attached to all the wiring, in the track of the shower door, in every nook and cranny and behind all the walls – absolutely crazy! We thought at first that we’d be able to salvage some things….but the more we tore things apart, the more it was apparent that there was not a single inch of the trailer that had not been touched by animals, insects, or water! And it all started from a crack in a vent on top.
Can you imagine if that had simply been fixed? Yes there still would have been things find their way in…..but I don’t feel like it would have been to the degree it is.
What cracks in our lives are we unwilling to tackle and fix? What cracks in your heart today need repaired? Is there something that you can work on today? We often don’t realize what just letting a “little of this” and a “little of that” grow into a lot of something that suddenly turns into complete destruction in our lives. I realize this sounds dramatic, but it can be. We see it everywhere with wrecked marriages, wrecked relationships of all kinds. My purpose here is to encourage us in our hearts. So my examples above are to simply give some practical application. Maintaining relationships is not easy, it’s why people trade in spouses, and friends, and end up being estranged from their children.
We don’t have control over everything…..not even close, but we can work to daily maintain the relationships we have.
On the outside of this trailer when we picked it up, it did not look great, yet in getting to the “bare bones” of things it was even worse than we first thought. Is that us? Obviously I talk a lot on here about skincare and makeup…..but my purpose has always been that true beauty radiates from within. God sees our hearts, what’s underneath all the outside of cute clothes, makeup, our hair being done…..when all of that is stripped away, who are you? We often like to spend more time and money on the outside appearance, I want to encourage you today to flip that around. Start with the heart and build from there. Shore up the cracks in our foundation….let God go to work transforming you from the inside out! Until next time, Blessings and Hugs!
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