Sometimes you stop and take stock.
My walk to work takes me past a house on a corner lot that has been empty for sometime. Or at least it did.
I understand it was a deceased estate, and it wasn't too surprising when the Auction sign went up, nor when the sold sign appeared and the development notice right along with it. It is an area booming with unit development, being in a so called transport hub.
As I walked up the hill to work the other morning there were men in blue protective suits stripping the inside of the house of asbestos sheeting. That afternoon as I walked back down to catch my train, the demolition had begun.
I was saddened by the need to destroy something that had meant something to someone. A house where life had happened. Where perhaps children had been born, grown and moved away. A house where there had been laughter and where there had been tears. A house that was more than wood and glass, but rather was a home.
But then I thought, no, it's not the house that makes that, it's the people who live there, their relationships, the things they do together, their memories. They could be somewhere else and still make for themselves a life, still love each other, and laugh, and cry, feel happiness and loss.
It wasn't about the house, my sadness, I think was more about the lives that had moved away, parted by the death of the owner, the promises to stay in touch and the drifting apart as life grows busier and relationships more distant.
And yet, surely there was another legacy unseen.
I thought of Matthew 6:20-21, where we are advised to "lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal." The treasure of the heart. Left to those who remain.
Did the person who lived in the house, who had made it their home love The Lord as I do? Knowing that the love of the Lord is "everlasting to everlasting..." (Ps 103:17) Something of The Lord's love would have been in their hearts for their children if that was the case, and I hoped it was.
And when I got home and my boys greeted me with a hug and a cheerful, "Hey Dad, how was your day?" for a moment I thought of the voices that might have echoed in that house, gone now, and just for a moment I was reminded of the treasures I have, and am so very very grateful for. Whatever comes, whatever goes, whatever I have that passes away, to moth and rust, there will always be that: Love.
It is a real Blessing from The Lord, and I can Praise in All Joy the God who Provides it.