The day before I left for training camp, the parking lot at work was a mess. Dull gray. Cracks everywhere. Potholes deeper than I am tall. Okay – so maybe the last was an exaggeration, but you get my point. OR you will when I tell you that least once every couple of weeks, one paving company or another would – in the course of picking up parts for their trucks – leave their card.Monday (this past Monday) when I came back after camp, something unfamiliar assaulted my eyes as I made my way to the break room at the back of the building. Black, smooth… asphalt. Fresh lines to mark spaces and ‘no parking’ zones. It was a whole new parking lot.
I’ve spent the last four days grappling with what this means – both physically and spiritually. The physicality is pretty easy to get, though. Cars park straighter. Buses and trucks get less wear and tear as they go through the driveway from the front parking lot to the back service entrance. And new asphalt means the business might actually care about their appearance… maybe they’re not going down like so many other people are!
The problem for me is in the metaphor… or metaphors. I’ve found that they could go two ways:
- The new asphalt is little more than a face lift. Eventually, things will settle. All the cracks and potholes will come back. In the same way, we cover up all the things we see as wrong in our lives and expect the cover up to hold tight when it was only meant to camouflage for a short time. The thing is that this kind of stuff always reveals itself in time. We are never able to fix the problem on our own. Only God can do that.
- Going into training camp, I was like the old parking lot. Cracked, gray, full of potholes. In just a few days, God and I tore out the tired asphalt that was my life and cleared out the dirt, broken glass, and other trash that had accumulated along the side. Then God laid down new asphalt. Smooth, black, and clean. Instead of leaving me with a broken heart and limited room for the Holy Spirit to do its thing inside of me, I have been given the freedom to be who (and what) I was created to be. While I know that there will come a time when the parking lot of my life will at some point have to be
repaved, I know the God who constructed it in the first place is loving and patient, and has taken great care to make sure that it is beautiful every single time.
It isn’t that only one metaphor applies and not the other… because both are true, and I know that. What I’m wrestling with as I write all this out is whether the two are distinct metaphors which are both applicable to my life, or two parts of the same metaphor. Either way, how do I live them out in my life, now that this truth is something I have allowed myself time to think about?
P.S. Neither of the pictures is anywhere near where I actually work. They’re just really good before and after pictures of a parking lot that I found searching Google Images.
