Last evening at 5:30, the rumbling stopped.
But only for the weekend. At 6:30 Monday morning, the trucks and backhoes will be back again. After two full days of working, they've replaced the culverts in two driveways and prepared the ditches in between. At this rate, they'll go up the other side of the street next week and down our side of the street the week after. We'll be almost the last ones on our street to "benefit" from the "improvements" - yet we were the first to have two huge piles of soil dumped in front of our property.
Hm.
And we've learned that - joy of joys - the culvert we had paid someone to install two years ago will be dug up, taken out and replaced by their (larger) culvert pipes and concrete access wells. We've been busy taking "before" pictures so that if the company wrecks anything on our property, we'll be billing the city (who is paying the company) for any work we have to get done to bring it back to the way it was before. Like, for example, if they wreck our hedge and we need to replace it!
That said, the whole idea of having to re-dig and redo a job that has previously been done brings up several intriguing thoughts to the surface. The accuser that sits on my shoulder has been whispering - sometimes shouting - the insults, fast and furious, voices from my past echoing their agreement. The most common one is this: "Nothing you ever do is good enough."
It's a bald-faced lie, of course. But the voices persist.
And my response is that if I had it to do all over again, given what I knew at the time, I would still have gotten the work done.
The fact is, it was a safety issue in 2010 and I wanted my hubby to not run the risk of injuring himself on such a deep slope as that ditch when he was mowing the lawn. Technically it's not even part of our property ... but .... the city certainly wasn't going to mow it! No, it was the right and healthy choice to make ... for the ditch, for safety's sake.
The whole process has me thinking again. A dangerous thing, I know. Yet it has brought something new to my way of thinking.
Sometimes, in the emotional and 'inner healing' realm, after I've dug down inside of me and "made it right" to the best of my ability - then .... I grow some more. And when I've grown some more, there are more subtle, stubborn things that come to the surface - things that make me realize that it IS necessary to dig deeper and do it again, work a little harder than before, root out even more of the dangerous stuff, and make it easier to access should I ever need to get in there again and dig something out.
The original internal excavation was necessary. (And I was SO glad I didn't have to face it alone!!) It made life liveable... functional... better. But it also opened up new possibilities, and set new standards for my inner life. This new lifestyle isn't easy, and it isn't comfortable. And often old, long-standing ideas bubble up from beneath - like sewer gases - and undermine the new thought patterns. It's easy to slip back into them; I held them for such a long time.
The fact is, the process is never over. That's why they call it a process. There's always more to do, deeper to go, more improvements to make. And I can see cracks appearing in what I thought was solid. I can smell things I thought were gone. Reactions I have, some good - and some not so good. The way I handled the hard-hat fellas, pretty good. The way I handled a recent conversation between a relative and myself - some aspects were good, but there were things I could have done or said better, or not done and not said; these things let me know that there is still work to do inside of me: in my attitudes, by being more honest with myself, more open to God's renovations, and more willing to change.
And that's okay.
Sometimes it's good to dig deeper if it means an even better life.
But only for the weekend. At 6:30 Monday morning, the trucks and backhoes will be back again. After two full days of working, they've replaced the culverts in two driveways and prepared the ditches in between. At this rate, they'll go up the other side of the street next week and down our side of the street the week after. We'll be almost the last ones on our street to "benefit" from the "improvements" - yet we were the first to have two huge piles of soil dumped in front of our property.
Hm.
And we've learned that - joy of joys - the culvert we had paid someone to install two years ago will be dug up, taken out and replaced by their (larger) culvert pipes and concrete access wells. We've been busy taking "before" pictures so that if the company wrecks anything on our property, we'll be billing the city (who is paying the company) for any work we have to get done to bring it back to the way it was before. Like, for example, if they wreck our hedge and we need to replace it!
 |
| The view "up the street" from just behind the central opening in our fledgling hedge. You can see some of the silent machinery in the distance. |
That said, the whole idea of having to re-dig and redo a job that has previously been done brings up several intriguing thoughts to the surface. The accuser that sits on my shoulder has been whispering - sometimes shouting - the insults, fast and furious, voices from my past echoing their agreement. The most common one is this: "Nothing you ever do is good enough."
It's a bald-faced lie, of course. But the voices persist.
And my response is that if I had it to do all over again, given what I knew at the time, I would still have gotten the work done.
The fact is, it was a safety issue in 2010 and I wanted my hubby to not run the risk of injuring himself on such a deep slope as that ditch when he was mowing the lawn. Technically it's not even part of our property ... but .... the city certainly wasn't going to mow it! No, it was the right and healthy choice to make ... for the ditch, for safety's sake.
The whole process has me thinking again. A dangerous thing, I know. Yet it has brought something new to my way of thinking.
Sometimes, in the emotional and 'inner healing' realm, after I've dug down inside of me and "made it right" to the best of my ability - then .... I grow some more. And when I've grown some more, there are more subtle, stubborn things that come to the surface - things that make me realize that it IS necessary to dig deeper and do it again, work a little harder than before, root out even more of the dangerous stuff, and make it easier to access should I ever need to get in there again and dig something out.
The original internal excavation was necessary. (And I was SO glad I didn't have to face it alone!!) It made life liveable... functional... better. But it also opened up new possibilities, and set new standards for my inner life. This new lifestyle isn't easy, and it isn't comfortable. And often old, long-standing ideas bubble up from beneath - like sewer gases - and undermine the new thought patterns. It's easy to slip back into them; I held them for such a long time.
The fact is, the process is never over. That's why they call it a process. There's always more to do, deeper to go, more improvements to make. And I can see cracks appearing in what I thought was solid. I can smell things I thought were gone. Reactions I have, some good - and some not so good. The way I handled the hard-hat fellas, pretty good. The way I handled a recent conversation between a relative and myself - some aspects were good, but there were things I could have done or said better, or not done and not said; these things let me know that there is still work to do inside of me: in my attitudes, by being more honest with myself, more open to God's renovations, and more willing to change.
And that's okay.
Sometimes it's good to dig deeper if it means an even better life.
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