“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.”
— Psalm 127:1, NIV
I wrote about the soul as something under construction.
Formation.
Deconstruction.
Reconstruction.
The soul becoming.
The soul evolving.
The soul being shaped toward God or away from God, toward freedom or deeper imprisonment.
That sounds almost beautiful when written from a distance.
But today I am thinking about what it feels like when God actually starts tearing out walls.
Because that is not beautiful.
Not at first.
It is loud.
It is dusty.
It is disorienting.
Rooms you thought were safe are suddenly full of exposed beams. Beliefs you leaned on for years are pulled away from the studs. Old prayers stop holding weight. Certainties crack. The inner house becomes unfamiliar.
And you still have to live there.
That is the part people do not talk about enough.
You do not get to leave your soul while it is being rebuilt.
You still have to wake up inside it.
You still have to make coffee inside it.
You still have to care for your mother inside it.
You still have to pay bills, answer messages, deal with the news, take medicine, manage fear, grieve, pray badly, and try not to become bitter while the walls are open and the roof is leaking.
Transformation is not always a warm glow.
Sometimes transformation is demolition with no clear blueprint.
And maybe that is why the dark night feels so terrifying.
Because I do not know whether God is rebuilding me or whether I am simply falling apart.
Maybe that is the question under all of this:
Lord, are You tearing out walls because they cannot hold me anymore?
Or is the house just collapsing?
I do not know.
I wish I did.
There are parts of me that probably needed to come down.
Rooms built out of shame.
Rooms built out of fear.
Rooms built out of bad theology.
Rooms built out of trying to make myself acceptable to people who were never going to bless me.
Rooms built out of survival.
Rooms built out of pretending I was fine.
Rooms built out of the belief that if I did everything right, God would make the road clear.
Some of those walls were not holy.
They were just familiar.
And familiar can feel like safety, even when it is a prison.
That is the terrible mercy of deconstruction.
It shows you what has been holding you up and what has been holding you hostage.
But from inside it, it just feels like loss.
It feels like God walking through the soul with a hammer.
It feels like He is taking down the only rooms I knew how to pray in.
The room where prayer felt warm.
The room where certainty lived.
The room where calling felt clear.
The room where the Eucharist felt close.
The room where I believed ministry would become a road.
The room where I felt chosen without questioning it every five minutes.
And I want to say:
Lord, wait.
I still needed that wall.
I still needed that room.
I still needed somewhere to sit.
But maybe God knows some rooms cannot survive the truth.
Maybe some structures were too small for what the soul is becoming.
Maybe some parts of me were built only to survive exile, not to carry freedom.
Maybe.
I do not love maybe.
I want a blueprint.
I want a schedule.
I want the holy contractor to show up and say:
This wall comes down today.
This beam goes here.
The roof will be repaired by Friday.
You will feel God again in three to six weeks.
The Eucharist will return after inspection.
Your heart will pass code.
But that is not how the soul works.
There is no clean construction schedule for grace.
There is only the noise.
The dust.
The waiting.
The strange grief of losing even the broken things because at least they were known.
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”
— Isaiah 43:19, NIV
That verse sounds hopeful.
It also annoys me.
Because no, Lord, I do not perceive it.
Not clearly.
I perceive the tearing.
I perceive the absence.
I perceive the old ways not working.
I perceive the heart folding in on itself.
I perceive the mind racing.
I perceive the soul starving.
I perceive the locked chapel, the ruined church, the storm over water.
If You are doing a new thing, it is hidden under a lot of rubble.
And maybe that is faith right now:
not seeing the new thing,
but not walking away from the construction site.
Maybe faith is standing there in the dust, coughing, angry, overwhelmed, saying:
If You are building, then build.
If You are tearing down, then stay long enough to rebuild.
Do not strip me and call that healing.
Do not empty me and call that formation.
Do not take the walls and leave me exposed to the weather.
Build, Lord.
Stay on site.
That is the prayer.
Stay on site.
Because this is my fear: that God starts the work and leaves.
That He tears open the soul, exposes every hidden wound, removes the old supports, and then goes silent while I am standing there with wires hanging from the ceiling.
That may not be good theology.
But it is honest fear.
And honest fear belongs in prayer.
Lord, stay on site.
Stay in the dust.
Stay in the noise.
Stay when I am angry.
Stay when I am numb.
Stay when I cannot tell the difference between purification and punishment.
Stay when I accuse You of absence.
Stay when I am too tired to help with my own rebuilding.
Stay when the child in me cries because the room is changing again.
Stay when the priest in me feels useless.
Stay when the soul cannot find the old door to You.
Because I do not want a God who only appears at the ribbon-cutting.
I need the God who remains during demolition.
I need the God of exposed beams.
The God of sawdust.
The God of half-built rooms.
The God who can bless a house before it is livable.
The God who does not despise unfinished things.
Maybe that is why Christ matters so much here.
Christ was a carpenter’s son.
He knew wood.
He knew beams.
He knew tools.
He knew the weight of a door.
He knew what it meant to build with hands.
And later, He knew what it meant for wood to become suffering.
The cross was made of beams too.
That thought stops me.
Because Christianity does not give us a God who avoids broken structures.
It gives us a God nailed to one.
A God who enters the wreckage.
A God whose own body became the place where the old world did its worst and the new creation began hidden underneath blood.
So maybe reconstruction does not always look like clean walls and fresh paint.
Sometimes it looks like resurrection beginning in a tomb.
Sometimes it looks like Holy Saturday, when nothing appears to be happening and everything holy seems dead.
Sometimes it looks like a soul under construction, not yet beautiful, not yet stable, but not abandoned.
I need to believe that.
I need to believe God is not just tearing things out of me.
I need to believe He is making room.
Room for truth.
Room for mercy.
Room for a faith that is not built on fear.
Room for a priesthood that does not depend on applause.
Room for a prayer life that does not have to lie.
Room for the wounded child to be safe.
Room for anger to become lament instead of hatred.
Room for the Eucharist to return not as performance, but as bread for a starving soul.
Room for God to be God, not the small version of Him I could control.
But right now, it mostly feels like dust.
And maybe that has to be said too.
Sometimes the holy work looks like a mess.
Sometimes the soul does not look like a temple.
It looks like a house with tarps over the furniture.
A room with no flooring.
A chapel with broken windows.
A sanctuary full of scaffolding.
A place where you can still smell what burned.
That does not mean the Builder has failed.
It means the work is not finished.
And God help me, I am not finished.
I am not aligned yet.
Heart, mind, body, and soul are still arguing with each other.
My heart is bruised.
My mind is loud.
My body is tired.
My soul is hungry.
My consciousness keeps doubting the whole project.
But somewhere beneath all of that, I still want God.
I still want release.
I still want surrender.
I still want to believe beyond the shadows, even though I am learning that maybe shadows are part of being human.
Maybe total surrender does not mean the absence of doubt.
Maybe it means letting God into the doubt too.
Letting Him walk through every unfinished room.
Letting Him see the exposed wires.
Letting Him touch the beams I am afraid cannot hold.
Letting Him rebuild at a pace I hate but cannot control.
So this is my prayer from the construction zone:
Lord, if You are tearing out walls, show me what cannot stay.
If You are deconstructing me, do not let me confuse loss with abandonment.
If You are reconstructing me, give me enough light to survive the dust.
If You are building something new, do not leave me alone in the ruins of the old.
Stay on site.
Stay with the child.
Stay with the priest.
Stay with the body.
Stay with the soul.
Stay with the anger.
Stay with the hunger.
Stay with the places where I do not know how to trust You yet.
And when I panic because the old rooms are gone, remind me:
A house under construction is not a house without hope.
A soul under construction is not a soul without God.
I am not finished.
I am not rebuilt.
I am not sure.
But maybe I am still being made.
And maybe, somewhere beneath the dust, the Lord is still building.