Walking home this afternoon, I spotted a derelict building that I have never noticed before. The windows were blocked up and ivy was crawling up the walls. As I glanced to the left, I saw a pile of rubble towering over the nearby car park.
A picture of despair and hopelessness.
Or is it?
My first reaction was to think: What a shame. A beautiful old building has gone to waste and a pile of rubble has been left behind where another building once stood.
However, whilst these two things certainly wouldn't make it into a promotional ad for the town, God showed me something beautiful about them. They are not an end in themselves. They are a sign of hope and potential, a signal of something new on the way.
Sometimes we need to be broken in order to be rebuilt.
In their book, 'Deep Church', Frog and Amy Orr-Ewing outline four key processes for the rebuilding of the church, based on Haggai 1. I think that the principles are just as relevant to us as we seek to rebuild ourselves:
Some rubbish needed to be cleared - reformation. Some stones could be retained as good material - retrieval. But new wood was needed from the mountains - renewal. And a promise of acceptance, salvation and glory remained - revival.
We can't rebuild without sometimes first unbuilding and getting rid of what has gone before. Sometimes we need to remove false ideas and ideals; we need to demolish and destroy lies and strongholds which have choked us. We need to get rid of what was, to make way for what will be.
But that doesn't mean that we need to get rid of everything in order to rebuild. Sometimes we can use the rubble and fashion it into something new. This is one of my favourite verses in the whole Bible:
"You'll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,
rebuild the foundations from out of your past.
You'll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again."[Isaiah 58:12 MSG]
I came across this profound statement the other day (on this blog - http://brokencameras.com/tag/pain/) and I have been thinking about it ever since:
"Ruin is the starting point of transformation."
I know that in my own life, it has been in moments of complete brokenness, when everything I have lovingly built up has been razed to the ground and the foundations themselves are shaking, that I have found new life.
And in this broken state, Jesus promises to be close to us and to help to rebuild us:
"He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners."
Sometimes we need to be broken in order to be rebuilt.[Isaiah 61:1 NIV]
