Redemption

  

So, this week we worked with a group called Team Casas. Team Casas is a group of people who come independently to build a house and make their own group of random people...kinda like what we're doing this summer, except with more people. Anyway, this last week was different in a lot of ways. Mostly because the three of us actually had to slow down, take a step back, and let these people work with us. We had never really had to teach anybody how to do stuff before because we always just did it by ourselves. Also, we actually had other people to hang out with and talk to, which was great. One person in particular I talked to a lot was Theresa. This was her first trip, so she asked us to teach her how to do things before she actually tried doing them. While I was teaching Theresa the finer points of stucco, I had a pretty huge realization: Building these houses is a lot like living life. You're going to mess up sometimes, but there's always a chance for redemption.
            Theresa seemed to really worry that she wasn't doing everything quite right and frequently asked if her work looked ok. As I told her that she could screw up nothing on this house too bad to be fixed, I realized how much that concept applies to life, and how it relates to the grace that God so freely and unconditionally gives each of us. I even messed up the stucco several times myself just to show Theresa how easy it is to fix. As I started thinking about it more and more, I saw how much just the stucco applies to us as people, whether we're trying to be good or Christians or whatever.

            First of all, one of the keys to good stucco is good chickenwire. The tighter and flatter your chickenwire is, the easier the stucco will go on. The thing is, even if the chickenwire is terrible and it's really hard to get the stucco on it, the stucco still has to go on the house. We have to endure the bad chickenwire sometimes. The same is true about the stucco mixture itself. If the mix is too soupy, it's hard to get it to stick. If it's too dry, it just crumbles off the wall immediately. But sometimes in life, we get dealt a bad mix of stucco and we just have to work with what we've got, tell our stucco mixer, and hope for better next time. Other than that, the stucco mixer is the only one who can improve the quality of stucco we're working with, so there’s no use fretting about what we can’t change.

Now, on the subject of the actual application of stucco… you're gonna jack it up sometimes. It's inevitable. You're gonna leave a hole somewhere there shouldn't be a hole. But here's where the grace of stucco comes into play. You can just get some fresh stucco, flick it on there, and trowel right over it. No stucco job is too bad to bad to fix. However, you still have to see that there’s a problem and that it needs to be fixed. And you've got to be willing to fix it.

Another important factor to consider is that stucco dries. We add lime to it to make it dry even faster. That being said, you shouldn't wait till the stuff is completely dry to try to fix a spot that you should have dealt with before. In other words, when you see a problem with your stucco, the best time to fix it is right then. It will only get worse and harder to fix as time goes by.

The last lesson I learned from the stucco is that on the outside, after it’s finished, you can’t even see the bad spots anymore. As I was finishing the stucco, I liked how one side of the house was so evenly done and all the stucco looked nice. I got to another part of the house, and thought to myself, “Self, this stucco looks pretty rough”. But after it was textured and finished, it all looked the same. You couldn’t tell it was all choppy in one spot and smooth in another. So basically, even though some stucco has been through tougher times than others, it still all looks like stucco and is hard to judge without seeing it before it's finished.

So that’s what stucco taught me this week. And if you missed all that symbolism, good luck living life…you’ll need it.

Here's what I gave my stucco for this week