Our house needed some attention. The amenities were in disrepair. Toilets no longer flushed, buckets were placed under sinks and so many light were broken. We had made a substantial but necessary list of desperate repairs and had handed them to our landlord prior to the June/July break. And then we waited, with very little being done. We worked around the issues as positively as we could, mentioned some of our requests in a cheerful manner to our landlord as we handed over the rent each month, and waited. I only had one working light in my room and was forced to leave my bathroom door open to shower at night. I was bucketing water into my toilet to flush it each day and my housemates were forced to make similar adjustments to work around the issues. This was just becoming routine for us, implementing creative solutions on a daily basis. It didn’t seem anything was going to be fix so we just carried on as best we could skirting the problems.
But one day, after talking to a friend she mentioned she knew a moto taxi driver who was very handy and could come and address our issues. So a couple of days later she brought over the aforementioned repairman and he went from room to room looking over the problems and creating a list of parts he would need. At last our long awaited needs were finally being addressed. Our landlord, out of curiosity, come over to see what was going on and was quickly backpedaling with reasons why our maintenance requests had not been fulfilled. We nodded graciously at his reasons but were inwardly thankful that help had been found and issues were being resolved. The repair man worked tirelessly for four hours and then returned the next day for another four. At one point he walked out of my bathroom, hands grubby with toilet parts, declaring in good humour how old, rusty and broken the toilet was. You know things are bad when a Cambodian is amused with the state of your bathroom.
It reminded me of another blog post I read about making excuses for leaving things broken in our lives. The landlord wasn’t cooperating, we didn’t know how to find a repair man, it was too much effort to do something about fairly minor inconveniences. Here we had been just functioning around the issues and using excuses to not tackle our obvious needs. These inconveniences were far from minor, they were causing unnecessary stress and preventing us from functioning at our fullest.
So often I can allow things to sit helpless as the difficulties seems easier to manage than the process of dealing with the needs. I can just work around the brokenness in my life without drawing too much attention to the fact that I am not functioning at my best. My excuses are plentiful, and my ability to mask my problems are very creative. My stubborn pride causes me to attempt to stumble along in life without drawing too much attention, dealing with the issues or even asking for help.
Thankfully God is not content in leaving me in disrepair. He speaks to my heart and draws my issues to the open. Humbly I begin to accept His diagnosis of my brokenness and needs to be made new. At times I would rather solve things my way rather than His, as His ways can often be quite painful, forcing me to let go of unhealthy habits that I have clung to instead of Him. I struggle through the repairs, not realising the beauty of the end results. Yet once the broken things are mended I marvel at the transformation and question why I avoided addressing them sooner. I am a house in the process of being restored and the repairs have just begun.
Healing Broken Feet 