Two days after I told my boss I would be working somewhere else the next school year, the first school I taught at had a wrecking ball rock through the walls.

The building was across the street from my current school, and as I walked from the copy center or library, I could look out the window and see the different stages of rubble.

There was something sad about that pile to me. People would always stand and stare. Occasionally there would be echoing booms where you could almost hear the dust roll and find a place to land. It was a spectacle for a few weeks, but then people stopped talking about it.

But I thought of those bricks and walls. Old chalkboards and the ghostly wonderful bits of age-old buildings. The walls and bricks saw thousands of students, where leaned against, drawn on, and witnessed the sacred, unholy, joy-filled, awkward moments of teen age school days.

Yards away, the shiny new school began to take shape adjacent to the old school. All the times I viewed people looking, they were staring at the old. The rubble.

There are moments when I feel the shiny new building. In progress, not complete, but hopeful with some potential.  But mostly I relate to the rough bricks and smell of crayons and mysterious cleaner in plastic spray bottles. It’s familiar. They hold memories.

The great tear down reminds me of all the parables of the refiner’s fire, and tearing down walls, and letting Christ build us up, by sometimes tearing parts away and cleaning out wounds.

I look at the rumble and think it’s sad and beautiful and C.S. Lewis’ words ticker taped through my mind, “He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominable and does not seem to make any sense” That’s the thing with construction sometimes. “You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace He intents to come live in.”

And He is living in all the stages and seasons. I think it’s important to remember we are building, assembling along side though. It’s not just simply old or new, even right or wrong sometimes, but the process of creation with the master builder present and aware through all the ruins, rebuilds, and shiny new buildings.