Yesterday is known as Passion Sunday in the Christian calendar, but I didn’t feel a great deal of passion when I walked into the beautiful cathedral where we worship each week when we’re in Edinburgh. Normally there’s a magnificent vista along the nave, past the choir stalls, lit in the evening by candles, to the white altar with its intricately carved stonework, glowing columns of vivid stained glass beyond.
Yesterday the whole vista was marred. Stark scaffolding towered from floor to ceiling. The choir stalls, altar and stained glass could only be glimpsed through a criss-cross mess of iron struts and wooden planks. The struts were a haphazard patchwork of lurid yellow, pewter grey and rusty brown, their effect uniformly ugly.
Next to me, my husband’s expression mirrored my own. We slumped in our seats and prepared to endure a dismal service. But as the service got underway, the scaffolding was transformed for me into something of an object lesson, my own private sermon. Yes, it made a mess of the landscape, turning a serene space into a building site. But the disruption and ugliness were necessary, an unlovely means to an end. This time next Sunday, the minister assured us, the renovation work would be complete and the place would be even more beautiful than before. But you had to take that on trust.
I prefer life to proceed in ordered harmony, for circumstances to work out the way I want without disruption or disappointment, without frustrated hopes, financial worries or concerns about health or family. But I’m God’s renovation project, and renovation means scaffolding.
Can you identify the ‘scaffolding’ in your own life? Can you look back on difficult circumstances and see how they were used in renovation?
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