Do Your Maintenance

24 Sep

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”  ~ Kurt Vonnegut

A woodpecker.  Would you believe that?  It all began with a woodpecker.  No, this is not a similar story to Walt Disney amassing fame and fortune with a mouse.  It is a story about damage and maintenance to a house.

A couple of weeks ago, I began to be bothered by a knocking on my exterior wall at the house.  Of course, it was right at my living room area.  I went outside to find a beautiful blue woodpecker on the side of the house trying to pound through the stucco.  He put a few holes into the stucco before we hung up enough distractions to scare it away from the yard.

In the process of examining the holes, though, we noticed cracking stucco in a few areas of the house.  Bringing a professional out, lo and behold, we found that, due to the construction of the house and a couple of things not done correctly a few years before I came to Munster, water had been seeping into the walls in a couple of areas, separating the stucco from the walls.

Thankfully, it looks like the wood itself was not rotting.  However, we are now in the process of pulling off the areas that have been separating and redoing portions of the stucco exterior.

That got me to thinking about proper installation and maintenance not only of our buildings but of our bodies and souls.  I am most likely living proof of the need to do better maintenance on the body part of that equation.  Most of us are in need of not only physical work but, even more importantly, spiritual work.

If we do not keep ourselves in the proper frame of mind, or, should I say, soul, our spiritual lives will suffer.  They may erode from within.  Our exterior self may look good and healthy and normal but, deep within, we might be separating and falling apart.

Examine your faith life today and see what you need to do to keep your relationship with God as healthy as it can possibly be.

FAITH ACTION:  Make sure that you do everything possible to take care of your spiritual, physical, and emotional health today and every day.