Fixing The Foundation

Rotting floor joists and generational healing

Yesterday I took the plunge. I decided to hoik myself under the crawl space of our house to find out why our floors are sagging before putting time and money into the floors, new bathtub, vanity, kitchen etc etc etc.

I got under there to discover extensive water damage that is centered on the main wet wall shared by the kitchen and the bathroom. The majority of the bathroom floor along with the floor joist underneath it are all rotten. The floor joist bears the weight of everything in the bathroom and half the kitchen.

Building anything on this floor, investing anything in these spaces without first addressing the underlying foundational issues serves to allow the foundational problem to grow while deceiving us with the illusion of comfort and goodness. It’s a problem that will only compound as the rot is under pressure.

It will persist. It will compound. Being that it bears the weight of the floor, walls, and roof and everything under the roof, the problem will cascade into those areas….if not remedied now, before doing any further work.

That’s my understanding anyway and that comes from talking to a number of contractors and professionals in the field. Not just google.

We may be able to get a few years of comfort out of just slapping a layer of something pretty over it. But that just means that a bigger problem is growing for the future. It will result in a greater problem down the line.

The way I think is that the foundation that everything else rests on needs to be solid and dependable before any effort to make things pretty can commence. Otherwise, we can comfort ourselves in the middle of a deteriorating problem that will only grow worse over time. That’s my thinking but I’m still learning.

This house was built to be a peaceful shelter, a sanctuary where a family can live, eat, grow, learn and rest. Right now, it’s not exactly fulfilling that purpose. It’s dysfunctional when you take it’s original design into consideration.

In order to restore the original created function of this house, we are going to have to fix the foundation.

I’ve always had a compulsion to make sure things actually are good over merely looking good.

I’m a man with a very real and deep hatred of pretense. I hate the deception of things looking good but under the surface are a Pandora’s box of rot.

I have little tolerance for things that claim to bear a load when in fact it cannot.

I’d rather an ugly truth, over a polished lie.

I want to know what I’m looking at. I want to know what I’m dealing with.

So we are looking at some ugly truth right now.

To properly fix the problem to ensure a solid foundation for years to come, to fix it in a way that ensures we aren’t passing a larger problem on to whoever lives in this house after us, it will require an extensive renovation.

But we are those who repair the ruined….

Problems are no longer allowed to remain problems when they are handed to us.

We may have no idea what we are doing.

We may rely heavily on God’s abundantly available grace.

We will no doubt need help.

But it’s not a hopeless situation.

I don’t believe in hopeless situations.

Every problem has a solution.

There are no hopeless situations.

There is a solution to every brokenness. There is a path to wholeness for every broken thing in life. For floor joists, for rotten floors, for broken hearts and minds, for everything.

The question for all of it is:

“Are we willing to look an ugly truth in the face and partner with God in doing whatever work is necessary to make things whole again?”

Are we willing to accept a problem and accept our responsibility to fix the problem?

Or are we not willing to face the problem and are we willing to accept a quick pain killer a quick, cheap, cosmetic fix?

Do we treat the pain or the underlying cause of the pain?

Do we numb out or face and fix the problems?

Are we more concerned in life with feeling good & looking good than actually being good?

Will we sacrifice health and wholeness for appearances and good feelings?

Do we reach for relief or for the tools and/or help needed to actually fix the problem?

I grew up in a dysfunctional home. As a kid, I lived with alcoholics and drug addicts and/or the echos of their brokenness in almost every season of my childhood. I lived my entire childhood around people who sought to numb and escape as opposed to stop and fix.

It was the prevailing culture growing up.

That dysfunction touched every area of my life.

My home life was wrought with trauma which cascaded into my speech issue, which cascaded into learning disabilities which resulted in being in special-ed, which lead to being made fun of constantly and eventually, that lead to me lashing out in extreme violence towards those who made fun of me, which lead to me being locked up in a mental health facility.

My parents brought me to doctors for answers.

Understandable.

I was in and out of mental health facilities. I was under psychiatric care since I was 4 or something. Anxiety, fear, confusion, & shame were what made up the culture of my life. I had a speech impediment where I couldn’t talk. I would stutter to the point where talking was worthless.

But what no one was ever able to do was fix the foundation in me that had never really been properly established. My life was one of emotional survival and my interior life was a patchwork of quick fixes and painkillers.

It wasn’t until I had a radical encounter with the Love of Jesus that my foundations were even addressed.

He came to me in my drug saturated gasp for relief and He healed my broken heart. He brought liberty to my every captivity. He set me free from a lifetime of bondage and He declared favor over me. He poured out so much grace and kindness year after year after year.

Jesus plunged headlong into my every darkness and the light of His kindness illuminated every dank place that no one else had the will, skill or time to address.

He fixed what a hundred medications couldn’t touch.

He healed what a hundred doctors gave up on.

He covered the shame of my brokenness and gave me His own name.

He took my sinfulness and gave me His righteousness as a free gift.

He gave me beauty for my ashes.

He gave me the oil of joy for my mourning and the garment of praise for the heaviness that kept me low.

What happens when you surrender to Jesus and allow Him to do the work in your inner world?

What happens when you take the time, almost 2 decades to lean into the healing?

“They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of The Lord that He may be glorified and they shall rebuild the old ruins, they shall raise up the former desolations, they shall repair the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations.” (Isaiah 61:3a-4)

When you allow God to restore you, when you submit to His leadership and grace on your life. When you trust Him and follow wherever He leads, eventually, you will find yourself being used by God to rebuild the brokenness in people’s lives and in actual places on the earth.

This house is step one of walking in our calling to be Jesus to the world around us.

We have a broken house to restore for now but where it’s going it restored people who restore cities.

When Jesus is allowed to get into your foundations and fix what’s broken, you can then be restored to His original purpose for man which is tending and keeping a garden.

It looks like stewarding the earth until it looks like heaven because that’s what He did in us.

So being trusted with a house in this much need of work is an honor. It’s overwhelming. That’s why so many passed it over. That’s one of the reasons why we were able to buy it. It’s the same reason so many passed over me in life. Too much work. Too much trouble.

That wasn’t a declaration of how bad I was but how little hope they had.

They didn’t have a high enough hope level to fix that level of a problem.

So God turned me into the course correction.

Now The Lord has planted us and over time, what we build will bring shade to the weary and fruit for the hungry. By the grace of God may there never be a shortage of hope in this home. May this place be a sanctuary where hope can thrive and solutions can be created that make the earth look more like heaven.

In Jesus’ name, amen and amen.

If you’d like to sow into our work and partner with us in this process, it would be much appreciated. You can do by going to the giving tab up above.

Thank you. We love you.

Matt Bond and The Bond Fam