"I'm digging a big hole," five-year-old Brodie proclaimed as I walked into the yard. With all the forthrightness of a child and the solemnity of a high-court judge, he continued: "But someone keeps undigging it."
"What he means," chirped in his eight-year-old sister, Marie, "is that someone keeps filling in the hole. It's probably one of those teenagers."
"Yep," Brodie agreed. "And we're going to be having an unbirthday party at school."
With nary a word more but with the determination of a corporate decision-maker, Brodie picked up his toy shovel and returned to the chore of undoing the damage done by the "undigger" - of whatever age he or she might have been.
When our nephew, his wife and their three children (now four) moved to our town we were thrilled to have a few more family members to share our lives. In our greatest excitement, though, we never dreamed of how much joy they would bring. This "hole" dilemma is just one of the memories we treasure of our times together.
Now while Brodie's choice of words may have provoked a smile and a chuckle, there are a lot of circumstances in life that could be classified as "undiggings" - except that they are not the least bit funny. Any number of things, from an accident that robs us of the life we once enjoyed to a financial setback or the fracturing of a once-cherished relationship, "undiggings" leave us reeling. Suddenly the comfortable nest we'd been building collapses, the foundation we'd been laying for our future caves in and no amount of blaming someone else can bring it back.
While trusting God doesn't guarantee we'll never have "undiggings," it offers assurance that He is there, as Bill and Gloria Gaither have written, to make something beautiful out of our lives.
