| Beloved, Pink it a great color. In the recent past, I have sported a pink button-down (salmon, to be exact). In the more distant past, I even had a pink mohawk (that is no joke!). So I don’t have anything against the tasteful mixture of red and white. That being said, I do think people in the 1950s got a bit out of control in the pink department. When I first walked through our current home with our realtor, the master bathroom just about took the breath out of me. To say it was pink would have been an understatement. The shower was pink. The floor was pink. The walls were pink. The sink was pink. Even the towel rack was pink. The bathroom was not pink; it was PINK! At first, I found it kind of endearing, but the 50s glamor quickly wore off. So when Tessa and I learned that the only solution to a mold problem in our shower was to tear it out, we were both excited. “Why not take the other pink with it?” That is precisely what we did. Over the last few weeks, our little bathroom has been overhauled, and I’m happy to say that if you walk into it today, there is absolutely no pink or mold to be found. It is a beautiful thing! That beauty we currently enjoy, however, came out of 3-4 weeks of pure mess. Our room was disheveled and rearranged as we made room for our contractor, Scott (Beth Riley’s son), to work. Our bathroom was entirely unusable. Dust was everywhere (in spite of Scott’s incredible cleanliness). Add to that the mess of an unhandy preacher trying to patch drywall and paint. You get the idea. It’s been a little hectic, and we are only talking about one tiny room in our house! Think about it for a moment. If Tessa and I were unwilling to endure the mess, we would still be living with a moldy pink bathroom. To make something beautiful requires a willingness to get messy and uncomfortable. What is true of our physical, brick-and-mortar houses is equally true of God’s house. Too many Christians are looking for a church that looks like it came out of a Pottery Barn catalogue. They want to show up and enjoy the beauty without any mess. It never crosses their minds that God might be calling them to a church in need of minor or significant overhaul (which, by the way, He always is!). They have no category for willingly entering into the messiness of real church life and stirring up that mess to make something beautiful by His grace. Without realizing it, they are actually robbing themselves of the joy that comes when the messiness finally gives way to real beauty. Not having a bathroom for a month, the late nights of drywalling and painting, the dusty surfaces and air–all of it has actually served to deepen our appreciation and enjoyment of the bathroom now that it is complete. The mess wasn’t just something we had to grit our teeth and endure. It actually served to increase our enjoyment of the room in its beautified state. So too in the church. Cornerstone, as a building of believers, is in need of significant renovation. Every church is. There is pink. There is mold. There is much that is undesirable. How far short we fall from our gorgeous cornerstone, Jesus Christ! But that is the point. God hasn’t placed us here to passively enjoy beauty, but to actively use our God-given gifts in dependence upon the Spirit to make a mess unto making this house more beautiful! That will require physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual sweat and struggle. It is much easier to close the door to the moldy pink bathroom and pretend it doesn’t exist. It is much cleaner to move out and find a new house with a bathroom to your liking. But we rob ourselves of delight when we do that. The mess is all part of God’s plan for our joy! What might happen if each of us committed to willingly get messy and uncomfortable in the pursuit of expanding Spirit-wrought, Christ-like, God-glorifying beauty in our congregation? Imagine what this spiritual house might look like in a year or a decade if we did. Let us dream, friends, and let us get dirty in the pursuit of ecclesiastical beauty. Yours in Christ, Pastor Nick |
