Deferred Maintenance

As you can see, our Sanctuary is getting a "makeover."  Over decades, water has seeped into the walls around our big stained glass window of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and turned the inside wall into a rotted out piece of junk.  There was a maroon curtain hiding all this horrible mess from us, but other messes are pretty obvious.  You can see watermarks spotted all over the celiing.  The paint is a faded ivory. 

A couple years ago, when we had a fair, we left the sanctuary open for people to see.  Many admired it, because it really is beautiful.  One guy took a look (probably an engineer) and said, "what a mess!" or "you have a lot of work ahead of you" or something like that.

He was absolutely right.  Unfortunately, we have "deferred" maintenance on our church for a long time.  Slowly but surely, things have fades away.  Small problems got larger and larger.  Now we have a great group of Trustees committed to taking care of this stuff.  The projects they have undertaken is staggering in scope, yet absolutely necessary if the church is going to stand.

I have seen it before: it happened in my "home" church in Connecticut.  Day by day, week by week, things decay, fade, rot and it happens so gradually, you don't notice it.  You come in, Sunday after Sunday and you just seem to get use to the watermark here and the crack in the wall there.  I doesn't occur to you to fix it.  Until someone can objectively take a look at it, and see how bad things are.  

This is not too far from life.  We let things decay in our lives, day by day, hour by hour and not even notice it.  We can stray far from God, far from doing the things that nourish our souls, far from taking care of our bodies, minds and souls, until the "deferred maintenance" adds up and we find ourselves either in the hospital, or given orders by our doctors to do something drastic, or else.

Some people see straying away from faith as a dramatic event, full of soul wrenching events.  But, to me, "deferred maintenance" is how we get into trouble: it's a slow, gradual decline, a decay that is hardly noticeable, until one day you wake up, and see the watermarks and cracks in your life.  If we could only have sensible Trustees to take care of our lives, like the ones taking care of our church!