Renovation projects can be quite messy as anyone who owns a home knows. Disheveled room contents, chunks of muck, saw dust and white powder all over the place. Renovation seems a theme for me lately - largely driven by necessity. The Lord knows I need a little nudging to take on just ONE more thing these days and so I got "nudged" pretty hard in two key areas that did require some spiffing up.
In my family, completion of some decorating work in our basement had been put on permanent hold. Rome is burning, right?! I don't have time to finish the bar in my basement pool room or to decide what kind of flooring should go in my daughter's bedroom because I hate the Berber carpet in there. That wall-sized map mural we're going to put on our youngest son's bedroom wall is safe and sound in the nice round tube it shipped in.
Again, the Lord has a way of nudging us where we need to go. The northeast Lincoln area received the equivalent of three monsoon type rains in June. During one deluge, we received almost 6 inches of rain. Not a problem for a home with drain tile and a very sturdy sump pump, right? Wrong. Rain water backed up from the floor drain on each one of these three occasions. It wouldn't have been so bad, except all but a tiny, tiny room in our basement is fully finished. Fortunately, the backup was caused by a problem very easily solved: the cap was missing from our sewer clean out. An easy fix and not too much water. Just enough to make a very fine mess.
Painful, yes. My house looks more than a bit disheveled, for sure, and there's been plenty of dust, but...there's now beautiful porcelain tile installed in my daughter's bedroom and as a bonus, she's getting a closet overhaul. Next stops: quick detour to a wall mural and then directly to the pool room. I hope to be hosting some little gathering in my new "bar" this fall.
But my home is not the only place that needed renovating. The Grassroots in Nebraska website, although containing some nice content, is not how I or our best writer, Linda, would like it to be.
Also, our member site on NING was simply not meeting our needs. Further, this group has no "official logo" or branded look. On the one hand, there's been real doing going on. Substance over style if one has to choose, of course.
The parallel to my home decorating and renovating projects is pretty obvious and so, too, the required nudge to take action.
NING announced a couple of months ago it would start charging for its sites on July 20. This website has started to "eat" our posts mysteriously on occasion. So some other doing has had to slow down and the mounting pile of renovations addressed.
Painful, yes. There's been blurring of eyes (and banging of heads against walls) and some glitchy code, but there is a pretty snazzy new logo (although I clearly can not be objective), there is a beta test running on a new member site, and a developing beta test for a redesigned website.
I was "inspired" to write this post not only to fill folks in on progress, but also as a bit of explanation as to why in my blurry-eyed management of this site in the past week a post was prematurely released and then mysteriously vanished. It's like a drip of paint that gets on the woodwork by mistake. Renovations can be a messy business. The post, very well written by Linda, will be up in a day or two when we've completed necessary final additions of links, etc.
Finally, though for now, the moral of this story is that God is good - sometimes when we're too busy to listen to the whispers in our ears about what we should be doing - we get nudged. And once we get past the frustration, more often than not, we see why...and that it was all worth while.
I see light at the end of the tunnel on this work, but it will be a little while longer before all is complete. For now, I'd like to share one version of the new logo:
Looking back on my life, I can clearly see how ‘pain’ is often the motivator for action and in fact a safeguard to us all. I am reminded here of recently learning that a leper’s reason for injury is the fact that his ability to feel pain is essentially gone. Think about it and you will see that it is pain that protects us from many things like the heat as you approach fire. Sometimes the perceived pain oncoming causes us to move in a new direction entirely.
Thank God for pain and for His protection. Look to Him in all matters. We can trust Him.