if you feel like someone is tearing your house down, remind yourself you've been here before

​I have a running route I've run frequently this summer. One day along it, I noticed workers starting to gut out the insides of an old house that had been crumbling down on a corner lot for years. I always found it to be an eye sore. I thought, you fancy yourselves as miracle workers and not carpenters if you think you're going to do something with that dilapidated heap of lumber.

Slowly but surely, though, an actual miracle DID start to happen. Until one day I found myself running by that house and wondering, how much do they want for that house. It was beautiful.

It reminds me of a favorite bible story in Genesis. It's the story of a young teenager named Joseph. He has a bunch of brothers who get jealous of him and strip him of his clothes and throw him in a pit to die. A house doesn't get more wrecked than Joseph's life was at that point.

As circumstances would have it, though, a tribe of people traveling to Egypt passes by and the brothers decided to lift Joseph out of the pit and sell him to these people. In a very long Genesis story made short, Joseph would go on to be the second most powerful man in all of Egypt.

If you read through the Genesis narrative of Joseph's life, you'll discover the main key to his transformation was that he never saw his house as wrecked as others did. Even from a young age, Joseph had this capacity to see he was in the midst of a renovation, not a demolition.

That's hard to do, isn't it? When our lives are in the midst of a renovation to feel like someone - God maybe - isn't intent on leveling us.

I've talked to so many people lately who are going through tough challenges. There are job losses and job worries. There are relationship struggles. There are countless health concerns. There is loss and there is grief. There are so many people who are naked and at the bottom of a dark pit with no light to be found.

All I can say is I get it. I get it because I've been there. I get it because some days I still wake up in the pit.

I'm grateful, though, that I also get renovation. Oh have I been that house that people have walked by and thought, who on earth do those people think they are that they can make anything livable out of that heap of a mess. Yet, here I sit writing with somewhat of an inexplicable feeling of hope.

Not hope because I'm overwhelmed with a "life is good" feeling. Not hope because I have no worries in life. Not hope because I've reached this point in life where I'm confident no one is ever going to throw me in a pit again. No - my hope is based on the truth that every time I've been in a pit before, God has pulled me out and made me a better version of the pre-pit me.

Hope because when I look in the rear view mirror of my life, I see God constantly turning me from an old heap of lumber to an "I wonder how much that house costs" sort of life.

All I can say is today, if you feel like someone is tearing your house down, remind yourself you've been here before. This isn't the first time you've mistaken a complete and beautiful makeover of your life for a total demolition. In the middle of the makeover it's so easy to feel like we're incapable of being the product of a miracle renovation. We aren't worthy of it.

Fortunately, we have a miracle carpenter in our corner. He is an expert at making us into the beauty he sees we can be out of the ugly we often see and feel like we've been. God has always been running by our lives wondering, wow, how much for that one?

We are all on our way to a beautiful renovation. Some days it simply takes us believing that. Having faith in that.