April 13, 2012

The Future Remains Unwritten

It is Friday, April 13, 2012, and I do not yet know what tomorrow holds. Funny that such a statement can be made, given how self-evident that is for any of us. Indeed, the title of this post feels a little over the top for its topic, but it works for me, so I'm going with it.

'Twas Burns that said of mice and men,
Two hundred years ago
The best-laid schemes gang aft agley, a
Truth so wretch'd, bless'd be
To twist the tack of life we plow!
I've never been overly keen on long-term planning, in the sense of the "where do you want to be in 5 years, 10 years" variety. It is not that I believe setting goals and having a vision is unimportant - quite the contrary. It is just that over time (and reinforced the last two years in a rather painful manner), I've learned that life has a way of upsetting "the best laid plans o' mice and men." The more detailed you plan, the more likely events will invalidate your efforts. The key lesson (one I often face) is learning to adapt, keep moving and avoiding the trap that leads to paralysis when life takes a hard unexpected turn. I slip into that trap sometimes, especially because I'm typically not a big fan of "change."

It has been six weeks since we lost our home to the storm. The most frequent question I am asked, and one we ourselves are still asking, "are we going to rebuild"? So much of our focus these past few weeks has centered on the re-establishment of routine, all the legal and insurance matters, and the effort to methodically put our lives back in order. We are back at work. We are living in a rental house. Our old property is cleared of all major debris. We have managed to reduce our salvaged items from 2 10x25 storage units down to 1 (sadly, at least half of what was salvaged so far has not proved savable), but we still have a long way to go. And as much as we have tried to return to routine, life remains anything but. When I am at the office, I find myself preoccupied with matters associated with recovery. When I'm out and about looking at houses, or going through storage, or attending to little things like overdue car tag registrations and the tax assessors office - I find myself fretting about the projects at work that are at risk of falling behind schedule. James 1:8 notes that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. While intended for a different context, that verse to some extent does capture the distracted nature of my days. Not much to do but to pray and press through as best I can.

We have met with one builder, and plan to meet with one or two more. The one we interviewed believes that the existing foundation, aside from some repair and reinforcement, should be safe to reuse if we choose to rebuild. Once we get some cost estimates, we'll have a better feel for what the options truly are. On the one hand, this is a buyer's market for housing. I could even make the argument that it would be far more pragmatic in this economy to buy a house, rather than rebuild, since it is likely that the cost of rebuilding will exceed the cost of buying. And yet, I fully own that land. To not rebuild, I would still incur a cost of restoring it to a condition to sell. The original house plans are sitting here on the kitchen table, and each time we or the boys look at those plans, we talk as if rebuilding is the natural answer to what happens next. And certainly there is more excitement surrounding that path than the one that leads to buying something else. But of course, we miss our home, and this is all indicative of the process in which we find ourselves.

Soon I hope, we'll be able to choose a direction and start down the path laid before us. We continue to pray, we continue to gather facts, we continue to heal. It'll become clear in good time.

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