Build

When I say I’m building my life in Kentucky, I mean that literally. My living room has become a makeshift wood shop these past few weeks, strewn with clamps and screws and planks of wood piled according to project. The centerpiece at present is not a fireplace or even a television. It’s a sheet of 3/4” plywood set atop two sawhorses, with a grid of 6” squares drawn over it in pencil.

If that particular project turns out okay, I’ll post a pic. No guarantees.

Much of the building is from necessity. When we divided our household in preparation for the move, I took everything that would fit on the truck with me—including about 25 boxes of books. The shelves, however, stayed with Denise. At a certain point in the unpacking, I faced the choice of leaving everything in the boxes until she arrives in the fall or building something new and more adequate.

Hence the mess in the living room. Whether it is a disaster area or construction zone is in the eye of the beholder.

My building spree is about more than necessity, though. It’s a kind of spiritual discipline, of taking the materials before you and creating something with them. Prayer and Bible reading have their place, but those and other traditional churchy things mean a lot less to me than they used to. I want a faith that does more than makes you feel good about your religiosity. I want a faith with tangible outworkings, one that gets your hands dirty. Construction, then, is good for my soul.

Then there’s this.

Most of us live in worlds that we inhabit, but had no part in creating. Our homes were built by professionals. Our workplaces are corporate or institutional structures that, for a sad majority of Americans, care little about us beyond what we can offer them. Our entertainment consists of stories told by others, games played by others, music recorded by others. A considerable amount of our leisure time goes to activities that are best described as “watching.”

It’s not all bad, of course. We enjoy a standard of living unimaginable less than a century ago. The house in which I live is several magnitudes more comfortable and efficient than the log cabin I would have built if I’d come here during the time of Lincoln. I’m happy to have a decent paycheck and a retirement fund. I love listening to baseball.

Still, these modern perks are not enough for me. Simply inhabiting a world is a path to powerlessness and despair. I need to look around and say I made something. I need to have a hand in shaping my space. Building makes a difference in how we view both ourselves and our surroundings.

At lunch last week, I was telling a friend about my bookshelf project. Her face lit up.

“I made my own bed once,” she said. “Like, the frame. I made it.”

We didn’t have time to get into nerdy construction details, but her husband did mention that it was solid enough for him to crack his shin on it. I couldn’t quite tell if that story pleased her, but I imagine it did. She’d created something that was useful and could not be ignored.

Sounds like a great life ambition to me.