Pulling Nails

My garage is a mess.  A summer of outdoor projects has taken it’s toll, and I am left with a mountain of items deemed too dirty or large to be allowed access to the house.  Winter is rolling towards me, so I am racing to clean the garage before I am caught in the snow.

 It’s getting cleaned up correctly this time.  Adding storage to the rafters, building shelves for all our gardening and automotive supplies, and most imprortantly, finally covering that last unfinished wall with some inexpensive sheets of plywood.  The studs have been exposed for 48 years, and I, along with the previous owners of this home, have not thought twice about pounding in a nail any old place that we felt like hanging a shovel or a bike tire pump.  So as I prepare to cover this wall, I must pull every protruding nail. 

A couple I recognize as my own.  Many more are certainly not mine, their  design or maroonish coloring betraying their age.  I claw the hammer in, ripping them out one by one, tossing them in the general direction of the trash can.  As they arc towards their final resting place, I think of the men before me.  These previous homeowners  who installed these nails without much thought, seeing them as a quick solution to the problem of where to put the rake.  And now, I erase their work, pulling out a piece of the history that they have left for me. 

 Makes me think of the temporariness of life, of how someday someone, maybe someone not even yet born, will come along and dispose of the plywood that I am currently affixing to the studs.  How God gives me time, a great amount of time, but still a very limited amount of time.

 This evening I read Psalm 90, where God seemed to speak to me about those nails.  This Psalm of Moses painfully points out the obvious, that we are limited to seventy years, eighty if we’re lucky.  Asking God to shorten the afflictions that we operate under, asking that we can spend these short days singing for joy because he loves us.  And Moses ends up talking about the very thing God had me thinking about as I pulled out other men’s nails;  that in this short life we can know that God is on our side as he establishes the work of our hands.

 It’s not just the nails, it’s everything we do.  The plywood that I put up today hopefully will last a long time, but it’s got a relatively short life span in the grand scheme of things.   It’s what God establishes that will last.