Their eyes were sparkling with both excitement and just a twinge of fear. They ran up pushing past each other wanting to be the one to tell me first, this fun opportunity to tell mom someone broke something and it wasn’t them. “Mom,” Xavier tells me in his very serious, giving-bad-news-voice which is so cute when you’re 3, “come with me, I gotta show ya.” He takes my hand and leads me to toward the front of the house and then turns to me and proclaims “Daddy broke the house!”

I laugh. I forget how kids see the world sometimes. There was my husband, working away on a porch addition to our house. In order to prep to add the new roof, he had to pull the siding off, cut into the wall and add support to be ready to hold the new beams. The kids were sure I would be upset with him. They could only see the destruction, they didn’t understand what he was doing was actually good.

“Oh honey”, I knelt down and explained, “you’re right I guess, Daddy is breaking the house, he has to break it so he can make it better.” He still didn’t quite get it and ran away eyes still sparkling thinking about Dad getting in trouble. (Dan tried his best to get sent to bed for what he did but poor guy had to keep working!)

I always forget to see how kids see the world and its so similar to how I see the world sometimes too. I just said a hard goodbye to our two foster sons who have been a part of our family for more than 2 years. They moved a few states away and I don’t know when I’ll see them again. My son just lost his foster grandma and a dear friend of ours who was a mentor to us and started us in foster care. There have been a lot of tears. There are days I see so much brokenness in the world, but especially right here in our community. There are days it seems we pray and He is not fixing it but making it worse. But I have learned something over years of watching my Father break things. He has to break them sometimes to make them better.

Maybe you can’t see what He is doing right now, you don’t know the building plans, you haven’t been in on the dreams of what this place could be. But He knows. He wants better for you. He wants to add on. He wants to build more room for love in my heart. He wants to put up pillars of compassion and understanding. He is building in huge support beams in me to be even stronger than before so I’m ready for what’s coming next that I cannot see. So He will break us. To us, it might seem like we are being broken, like it did to my children who did not understand. Which did make me chuckle, because my husband is quite the handy man who can fix just about anything. I don’t know if they’ve ever seen him break anything, but they’ve always seen him build and fix and make new. They should have trusted him when he started tearing apart that wall.

And we could say the same thing about Our Father. I have had a great peace about my foster sons, not because it doesn’t break my heart to miss them and know they’re missing us, but because I have watched God “break” things many times in my life. I have laid babies in the ground after months of praying they would live. I have watched relationships crumble and said goodbyes to children I have loved as my own. I have lost so many people I love and I am losing so many others who are turning away from God. I have often thought he was tearing my house to pieces only to see He was fixing it instead. He was building an incredible house I could have never imagined. He is the author of life. He is the ultimate builder, creator, He is constantly making things new. So I will trust the great carpenter, because I know if He is breaking something, it must be necessary to make it better, and I need only sit back and wait to see what beauty He is creating. But if I’m brave, I could even join in. I could even roll up my sleeves and start peeling back shingles beside him. Because maybe I could help move things along but mostly because what a joy it is to work along side my Father.