By Chantalle Wookey
Psalm 58 (NIV)
Today I am painting my kitchen. Correction – I am re-painting my kitchen. Some of you know that when Aaron and myself moved to Bournemouth almost five years ago we bought a house that was in a terrible state. The only option was to completely gut it, live in a building site and work endlessly on it till it was renovated (it's almost finished). This was a grueling task that involved living in a complete mess in the smallest room of our house and many nights coming home from work, then working on the house till the very early hours of the morning.
Eventually we made some progress. Slowly our house started looking less like a building site and more like a home. A particularly wonderful day for me was when Aaron and his dad installed the kitchen, having been cooking on a camping stove for six months you can imagine how excited I was! I set to painting with renewed excitement for our project.
However, after only a few weeks of the installation we encountered a problem. One of the walls in the kitchen was damp. We had specialists out to look at it. The man we paid to diagnose it insisted it was rising damp and was going to charge us a bucket load more money to fix it. We had no money left so we decided we had no option but to wait a little while to fix it.
A few days later while digging the garden we realised the soil was warm, this was very odd, it was not a particularly warm day. So we dug some more and found water! We knew it was from the hot water pipe but we just could not get to the problem. Eventually we realised the only way to fix the problem was to install a new hot water pipe in the kitchen and re-route the water. This involved ripping up a load of the work we had done including flooring and walls.
Our walls were fine they just couldn’t cope with the volume of hot water escaping into the soil from our house! The specialist had not told us the truth or had not done the investigation he said he did. As you can imagine we were furious. This escaping water has become known as ‘Wookey Springs’. We were gutted, ripped off by an untruthful specialist and now having to rip up all of our hard work. Injustice hung heavy in our house.
As I have been painting the kitchen today I have found myself thinking back to those times. I was taken back to feelings of annoyance over the injustice of that situation. All that work, money paid out falsely, hard work destroyed and STILL having to re-do work today.
In Psalm 58 David writes about the injustice in society. He sees the corruption of those in charge (v2) and laments their wickedness (3-5). He then goes on to ask God to allot out His judgment on these unrighteous (6-9).
On this earth there will be injustice. Things will go wrong. But this Psalm assures me God will judge. This Passion week I am reminded again that although sometimes the immediate injustices we see around us make no sense that Jesus will be victorious in the end. He has already WON but He is returning to bring about the justice of God. In it all we can pray for God’s will to be done and submit to his Sovereignty, even if we don’t understand why things happen as he really does know best. Living this way keeps our hearts soft so we can focus on advancing the Kingdom of God.
The hope from this Psalm is that God does bless the righteous.
As I am painting the walls from the destruction ‘Wookey Springs’ caused God is showing me how we are so like my kitchen. In our lives things will go wrong, these things can be very painful especially when the things that go wrong are so precious to us. The destruction in my kitchen happened, it was a painful experience but it revealed water that was flowing incorrectly and causing so many problems and potential problems. Because this was revealed it could be removed and a new water source could be installed. God will use times of pain and injustice to mould us so he can truly flow through us and then he will be our justice. The new pipe in the kitchen now feeds our home with the blessing of hot water that will refresh me as I take a much needed bath later to once again remove the paint from my hair, despite painful times the big picture is that I am truly blessed!
Love this
ReplyDelete