Dear Friends,
If you have an idea how busy our life has become as we write, speak, travel, and head up a ministry as well as a family, you'll understand why we fall a little behind in home maintenance. All right, maybe a lot behind. After all, home maintenance has no deadlines. It's always there. Right?

Wrong. When you're trying to buy one home and sell another, you come face to face with a deadline—getting one place ready for the move-in and the other ready for the "for sale" sign to go up. Ouch! The two of us are sporting a few extra blisters and band-aids lately, not to mention some shadowy circles under our eyes.

All this fix-up work has made us think about the meaning of Jesus' words in John 14:1-3, where He speaks of preparing a place for us. Not only is He preparing a future place for each of us in the Father's home, but He is building us day by day right now into a spiritual house, and He isn't finished yet. According to 1 Peter 2:4-5, each person who comes to Jesus, the Living Stone, the Cornerstone, fits into a prepared place in the total "structure." The Lord currently owns and occupies this living building, but He will certainly own and occupy it/us in new and wonderful ways when He moves the whole house and household into His eternal realm.

As we take joy in the preparation process, we can only begin to imagine His joy in His preparation process. The Master Architect and Carpenter is working each one of us into the place we uniquely fit so that the whole structure stands firm and accomplishes the purposes for which He has planned it and is building it. Wow! That means every little detail is as important as every other, from the light fixtures to the faucet washers to the. . . . (I won't burden you with the whole list we're working on.) May this word picture encourage you as it has encouraged us.

P.S. Have some fun imagining whether you're a welcome mat or a thermostat, a nail or a chair rail, or whatever else comes to mind.