After living in temporary housing conditions for over three months in Kansas plus the two months of packing up our lives in California before that, I was relieved to finally move into our home in Kansas at the end of April. I couldn’t wait to finally sleep in my own bed, hang up my clothes in the closet, and cook in my own kitchen. What I really longed for was to be finished with all of the limbo. I knew that this house would be a blessing because it had come as an answer to prayer and God had worked in miraculous ways to give it to us. However, with our house being quite the fixer-upper, only the upstairs of our home was ready to live in. We could move into our bedrooms and a bathroom and a half, but the rest of the home, including the kitchen and living room were still uninhabitable. There was not even flooring in those parts of the house. So we lived there still unsettled and spent all of our free-time working on it. And the more we worked on it, the more we discovered things that were wrong with it.
Everywhere I looked in the house, I saw things that were unfinished. I saw floors that needed to be installed, walls that needed to be patched and painted, things that needed to be scrubbed and cleaned, places that needed caulking, lights that needed to be installed, parts that needed to be replaced, the termite damage that seemed to never end…and that was just the inside. Our home became a place of stress for me and I no longer saw it as a blessing. It was a place of never ending projects that felt as if they would never be finished. I started to wake up each morning immediately thinking of everything that needed to be done.
One day as I was passing through our kitchen, I noticed some nails bulging through the wall and I started feeling overwhelmed again. As I started to worry, a thought came into my head: Every time you see something unfinished in the house, think about how IT IS FINISHED in Jesus. I think the Holy Spirit was kindly trying to take me out of my darkness of worry and bring me into the light of Truth. So I tried it. When I saw the water leak in the garage I said to myself, “It is finished.” When I pulled staples out from the stairs, I said, “It is finished.” When I cleaned out the fireplace that was filled with trash, I remembered that, “It is finished!” I thought far less about the work I needed to do and began to rest in the work that He has already done. I felt joy in my heart as I thought about Jesus’ great love for me and how He has accomplished the only thing I really need to be finished. Life no longer revolved around my earthly home with all of its problems, instead, it became about the Home He is preparing for me where no “rust or moth will destroy” (Matthew 6:19).
Isaiah 26:3-4 says, “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.” As I have put into practice the guidance of the Holy Spirit to focus less on my daily battles and think far more about the real battle that has already been won, my mind and heart have found peace. It turns out that my home in Kansas is a blessing. All around me I see Jesus, the One who took on the most daunting project ever because He loves me and finished it completely. - Deanne Snell
