When walls come down
One of the most common questions I get is where do I come up with the ideas for these columns? It’s a fair question that I myself pondered more than 20 years ago when the editors of this newspaper took me out for lunch in downtown Troy and asked me if I wanted to write a weekly column. I remember the meeting like it was yesterday; telling these nice people who offered me such a wonderful opportunity that I didn’t think I could come up with fifty-two ideas each year. They calmly told me to worry about one week at a time and see how it went. They assured me if I kept my eyes open to things happening in the world around me I would surely find things to comment on. They were right.
A couple of weeks ago something happened to my home that inspired me to write this week’s column. It was nothing good, in fact it was something horrible. My house was built about 60 years ago and has large stones attached to the outside giving it a castle type vibe. It’s one of the first things I liked about the place when I saw it.
The problem is over time the stones can come loose and need to be reattached with mortar. The repairs have always been minor but a couple weeks back I noticed a real problem in the back of my home. The rear of the house faces west towards Albany and because the house is up on a hill, in the winter, storms sweep right up the valley and slam the west side of my home. Years of pounding wind, rain, ice and snow have created some cracks I wasn’t aware of which a let small amounts of water to get in. Now you may be wondering, fairly, what does any of this have to do with writing a column? I’m getting there. What happened with the stones at my house is a metaphor for life; the good and the bad. Let’s start with the bad.
None of us live a perfect life and none of us is without sin. Yet every day we are surrounded by temptations looking for a crack to get inside and cause mayhem. Gambling, drugs, alcohol, pornography, greed; you name it there’s no shortage of malice. Every day there are bad elements looking for a crack in your foundation to worm their way in.
The mistake most of us humans make is thinking we can allow in just a little bit of sin, a little bit of vice and control it or push it back out when we choose. It is a fool’s strategy because once you let something like that in, it tends to spread.
That little bit of water that got into my stone façade spread and caused a dozen other stones to work their way loose. Life is a lot like that don’t you think? How many of the people who go to jail for embezzling large amounts of money started down this path by stealing just a tiny portion of money? How many people with drug problems that destroyed their lives started down that path with a small bag of white powder they promised themselves they would only occasionally use?
There is a wonderful movie that illustrates this lesson better than I ever could, No Country for Old Men. It tells the story of a good man, a rancher, who happens upon a drug deal gone wrong. Everyone is dead and there’s a bag of money just sitting there waiting for someone to take it. This man has led a morally clean life but he convinces himself he can do this one shady thing and then close the door behind him on the evil of the world. Of course he soon learns once you open that door, even a crack, you don’t know what hell might follow in after.
I promised you a bright side to this column and here it is. When the stone wall of my house came tumbling down I was overwhelmed. It was certainly more of a repair than I could handle so I called my father-in-law who is very handy. He came over to assess the situation and said we’re not going to rebuild the whole wall in one day. Instead he said we’re going to mix concrete and pour a proper base and footing. When that’s dry he said he’d come back and start putting the wall back up one heavy stone at a time. And that’s what I did. I mortared one stone to the wall, braced it to keep it place, then waited a day. When that was solidly in place I added another stone and then another. It took three weeks but eventually I rebuilt the wall.
The lesson in all of this is you can’t fix what’s broken in a life in a single day. You start with a strong base (faith, family) and repair things one day at a time. And once your wall is up guard it like your very soul depends on it. Because, it just might.