What does it really look like to be the hands and feet of Jesus? This week it looked like digging a big ole hole in the ground. It needed to be 5 and half feet wide and 5 and a half feet deep so that we could put a huge water tank in the ground. Our hosts home is located at the top of a hill and because of where they are situated they only get water each day after everyone else in town has already received access to it. So if a lot of water is used by the rest of the town that day, sometimes either the water doesn’t turn on for our host family or it only turns on for a limited amount of time. With the installation of the water tank, they will be able to keep water on hand at all times! The assurance of having water is huge!
Well people it all sounds simple in theory. Dig a big hole they said. Easy. I’ll do it myself and I’ll be done by lunch, I said. Wrong.
Digging a 5 and a half foot hole through cement and heavy clay soil is no small feat, people! I learned that the movie Holes is pretty innaccurate because there is no way those boys dug a hole the size of themselves day after day. Preposterous.
Anyway, our hole took us a good 22 hours at least lol.
If God taught me anything through this hole digging experience, it is that God gives us community for a reason and dang is God gracious to let us take any part in ushering in His kingdom.
Alright, I can’t tell you guys the lesson I learned without confession time, so here we go. If you ask any of the other 13 friends living with me, they could confirm that my pride got a little…ok a lot, mixed up in this hole digging business.
Myself and another friend or two at some point during the day decided it was going to be our personal mission to finish this hole no matter how long it took. The soil was super dense so we’d first break up a layer of dirt with a pick-ax and then someone else would hop in and shovel out all the heavy chunks of soil.
Y’all I worked in that hole for 3 days straight pickaxing and shoveling away. Lots of people helped but two friends and I decided to take a huge chunk of it on ourselves. Let me tell you though, man was I ever reluctant to let them take over my job, it was like pulling teeth every time I let someone else in the hole. My back was so sore I felt like a 80 year old woman and I developed as many blisters as fingers. There was no reason I shouldn’t have accepted help!!!
I wanted to look at the hole and say look what I did. We should probably rethink all our sentences that start with I. The truth is, whether it was digging, axing, or pulling the shoveled dirt away from the top everyone helped; I could have never in a million years done it on my own.
I look at this silly little hole and think about how for some reason it was so difficult for me to release my control of it. I just wanted it to be my thing, right?
How do you think God feels about His creation? He created a perfect world, heaven on earth, and brought us into it, knowing we would mess it up, because He wanted to be with us so much. God gave us free will because there is no freedom or love without choice.
We can’t experience Gods full love until we take our grasp off our own lives and let God have full control.
I honestly had a great time digging our hole, it was a lot of fun, but if I had changed my perspective from it being something I felt like I needed accomplish to let even more people in, I think it would have resulted in an even better community experience.
I want God to have full control over my life always. Here our some lyrics to a song I am praying over myself this week:
Make my eyes, your eyes
My ears, your ears
My tears, your tears
And won’t you make my hands, your hands
My feet, your feet
My dreams, your dreams
I give up control.
Amen.
