Thanksgiving

What a joy, on Thanksgiving Day, to host the gathering at my home. Daughter Amanda and husband Jason, son Ben and wife Jodi, son Matt and roommate Dave, Great Aunt Marge and I all shared a precious afternoon and evening.

We didn't lack for desserts!

After the meal, we chatted and played games around the table.

But just a few days before, that same area was completely torn up and "under construction." Many times I wondered what in the world I was doing, ripping up carpet and scrubbing walls, so close to company time.

But the desire for reconstruction of my home was too powerful to deny, or, evidently, even to delay.

The deconstruction part was nitty and gritty.

Housecleaning has taken a back seat in my life the last few years (or longer!), but even I was surprised at the amount of dust (allright--let's call it what it was: DIRT!) uncovered.

Dust. Dirt. Whatever you want to call it, every speck had to be uncovered, faced, cleaned up.

Into the bucket went every bent, rusty nail. Every scrap of worn-out, shredded wood.

Every old and broken dream. Every abandoned and outgrown hope.

No shortcuts. No easy way. Just inch-by-inch, slow and steady. Out with the old, to make way for the new.

Deconstruction. Reconstruction. Not necessarily easy, but oh my . . . how healing. How good for the soul.

For all this, and more to come, I give thanks.

[this is the end of the post. For some reason, I have a h-u-g-e amount of black space before the post ends. Sorry about that. I'm at the limit of my knowledge of how to fix it.]