Sketches and Sanctification

One of the things about moving from an apartment to a house is that your parents realize there is finally space at your own place for all the stuff you've been storing at their house, and the pressure is on to see how quickly and stealthily they can convince you to take it home with you. Such was the case this past weekend as the trunk of my car, which arrived with only a pet carrier and a suitcase, left crammed with assorted pieces of furniture, school projects, paperwork, and random nostalgic bits from my childhood. Isn't it funny how the things that represent pivotal times in our lives throughout the years just don't seem to fit quite the same in a new context? My little red barn jewelry box which secured all of my precious dress-up gems at my parent's house is now sitting in the guest room of my new house taking up valuable space. And for what? I no longer store my costume jewelry in the box, but the nostalgia won't allow me to get rid of it. And our houses are cluttered with these items, aren't they? Take my drafting table, which symbolizes the entirety of my college years. Hours poured over thin, yellow rolls of drafting paper, covered in eraser bits, with my hand coated in pencil lead, eager to produce the most perfectly designed floor plan. And now I find that I have no room in the new house for this giant table and its numerous accessories... and no purpose. I gave up the idea of professional design years ago, and yet, as I unroll CADD drawings and simple sketches from my past, I cant' help but thinking that these bits of scrap with all of the memories they recall, are really just a small symbol of God's own work in his bride, the church.

Let me explain.

One of the most essential tools for an interior designer in school is her little roll of yellow drafting scratch paper. And one of the first skills you are taught in using that paper is to place the roll at the far end of your table, place your T-square or ruler against the roll to hold it in place, and run the paper across the length of your desk so as to essentially create a running roll. That way, when you finish one idea or sketch, you can simply tug on the end of the roll, and begin another sketch so that your roll essentially becomes one long stretch of sketches and ideas. One of these old sketch rolls found its way home with me, and I ran across it today while cleaning out one of our closets. As I began to unroll the paper, I looked at the silly scratches on the paper, and remembered how very serious I was about those sketches during my college days. They revealed ideas that were worked and reworked and reworked again in my pursuit of greatness. But in considering them now, I see so many more of the flaws. None of them would be good enough for me to display in any way. But they reveal a process, a process which is at work in each of us. Sketch after sketch, the seasons of our lives pass, and we consider how each one, while good, contained a person bearing different flaws than the ones we are working on in this season, and sometimes we are embarrassed of the flaws from those old sketches. And yet, I suspect that that is not the purpose of those sketches... for them to have been perfect. No, drafting is a refining process. The sketches on those yellow rolls were never intended to be the final product. They were simply, if you will allow me, the "sanctification" process of my floor plan. Some walls had to be reworked, but sometimes it was not until I had finished putting in the other rooms that I would realize this need. And it was not until I attempted to put in the lighting plan, or furniture plan, or electrical plan, that I realized other flaws within the floor plan. And so the sketches on the end of the roll were pulled across the table, and a new, clean section of the paper was started in their place. While I would carry over the good ideas from previous sketches, I would intentionally find new solutions to the problems that I had discovered on the previous drawing. And how frustrating this process could be at times. I'd be embarrassed that I had overlooked such an obvious flaw with the plan, or that I had spent so much time working on a particular aspect of the plan only to find the whole thing had to be scratched and begun again.

But I suspect this is very symbolic of the beautiful plan God had in place all along, as articulated by Paul in Ephesians 5: 25-27. It reads,

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle, or any other blemish, but holy and blameless."

I love this verse because it shows love initiated by God, for God himself. It comes full circle to glorify himself... and our sanctification process is part of the circle of God bringing glory to himself, and peripherally, the church, the bride herself, is pure and holy and blameless, and finds her deepest satisfaction within the loop of God's love for himself. And this only works with God because of the perfection he bears that no one else living or dead has ever embodied. And so, if he did not admit that he was the only one worthy of worship, and only worshipped himself, he would cease to be God, and would become an idolator, recognizing something else as more worthy of worship than he is, and we would all be so miserably doomed. This is why placing ourselves at the center of God's purpose of the cross is very dangerous. If we say that the main purpose of God's death on the cross was for us, and not for his own glory, we set ourselves up as the idol of God's worship. And this is blasphemy.

Of course, we know that our justification, or position of holiness before God, is because God looks at Jesus and the work done on the cross and applies it to us, not because we are getting really perfect in our sanctification process. This is what is meant that Christ "gave himself for her [the church] to make her holy." But the sanctification process, that of Christ conforming us to look more like himself, is seen in the next part of the verse, "cleansing her by the washing with water through the word." And here are our many, many sketches. Roll after roll of edits on our lives, ultimately leading to a "radiant church" that can be presented to God in complete perfection.

And won't that moment make those painful, embarrassing, tiring or heartbreaking sketches all worthwhile? All along, we were being washed by the cleansing of the water of the word in order to be prepared for our king, our bridegroom, the one who gave up everything because he decided that the result of this union at the culmination of the kingdom was more worthwhile than if none of the fall and redemption had happened at all.

And so, unlike my little red barn jewelry box, even though those sketches found their way to my trash can, I do recognize them and the season of my life in which those sketches were being created as pivotal to my growth, or sanctification process. Those sketches, though bearing many vulnerabilities, errors, and weaknesses, are now solidified as key stepping stones to the next few phases of my life, and ultimately, to my king, where I will finally be presented as part of his radiant church, and find all the sketches worthwhile as all together we worship our King who gave himself up for us in order to present us as perfect unto himself for his glory.

*This post was written while listening to Phil Wickham's "You're Beautiful." He writes,

"We'll enter in as the wedding bells ring/ your bride will come together and we'll sing/ You're beautiful!"

We will be radiant for our beautiful king because of our merciful king!