Dismantled

A friend of mine recently bought a backyard play set for his kids off of Facebook Market. He has a little pickup truck and thought that they could find a way to make it fit, but as it turns out some dismantling was necessary. Actually, lots of dismantling was necessary. A UHaul was commandeered and something in the neighborhood of 60+ large lag bolts were removed in order to shove it into the box truck. Upon completion of the re-assembly in their own backyard, they were surprised to find a few lag bolts left-over with no idea where they might go.

“Dismantled” is how I feel on most Mondays. The efforts and personal investment of a day of ministry on Sunday is less devastating or exhausting than it is dismantling. All the parts and pieces of myself are accounted for, they just happen to be lying around in a heap in the back of a box truck. My thoughts are not firmly attached to my purposes. My emotions are disconnected from the actual events of the day. Everything is raw. The first few days of each weeks are spent getting re-assembled.

This process has become familiar to me and, when I am rightly ordering my life, is less stressful and takes less time. It occurred to me that this experience is a fractal of the Christian life. We are constantly being dismantled as we, with unveiled faces, behold the glory of the Lord and are changed from glory to glory. The prophet is undone when he sees the holiness of God. The first time you meet the Lord is incredibly disconcerting, because everything you thought about yourself turned out to be wrong and everything you thought about God turned out to be unworthy of Him. You discover that you have been living life with a broken compass, a nonsense dictionary, and life insurance brokered by Mickey Mouse. You thought you were one of the wise on the face of the earth but when your eyes see the Lord, you abhor yourself and repent in ashes.

As you mature, these epochal shifts become less frequent as daily growth becomes the norm. But then there is a cataclysmic event and you find yourself, once again, undone. And when the storm passes and you are left like a disassembled heap on the ground, the slow work of re-assembling your life begins to take place. After it is all back together, you look down and discover, to your dismay, there are some left-over parts and pieces. Be not dismayed, dear friend, those are the reason the storm came. Those are the parts that didn’t belong in the beautiful portrait of grace that God is painting. He dismantled you so that those bolts of self-confidence and those brackets of self-pity would never again attempt to bear the surpassing weight of glory for which He is preparing you.