They say that God is in the details.

Our new roof is leaking.

Our new roof is leaking around the old chimney.  You never notice the old as much as when you start to spruce things up.  Every new bit of trim…every new roof panel replacing a piece of rusted out old tin…every length of fresh siding up against the old…reminds us that things we didn’t notice when that was all there was are looking pretty decrepit.

It is pouring outside this morning. It is raining hard on the day after a holiday, when I’ll be delivering handfuls of absorbent paper soon… it’s setting me up for the expectation of an awkward time of it.

Back to the chimney issue.  The chimney is old and has cracks in the masonry.  When it’s dry it’s not a problem.  When it rains hard enough, the water follows the cracks and migrates its way into the house…and I wake up and step in a puddle when I make my way across the floor to go downstairs to start the coffee.

It’s not really fair to say that our new roof is leaking.  It’s actually our old chimney that’s leaking…to blame the new isn’t really accurate.  It really has to be pouring outside to even notice that it’s leaking…so the project of fixing the chimney is easy to put on the back burner…easy to postpone addressing the problem.

“It’s not leaking now that it stopped raining.”

This leak is the story of my life.  I don’t mean that I’m not blessed.  I’m blessed in ways I don’t understand…blessed in ways I take for granted…blessed in ways I never see until it’s raining.

What I mean is that I have a pretty good veneer…I take care of the roof…it’s shiny and new…but when it pours it’s not uncommon to feel the puddle in places unexpected.  My “chimney” is old and waiting to be fixed.  It has cracks that I can ignore unless it’s pouring outside.  It’s easier, too, to find fault with the people around me than it is to address the things that need fixing in my life. It’s a wonderful distraction to be able to pay more attention to what’s around me than to what’s inside me.

A masonry crack is easy to live with until the water finds its way in. My faults are easy to ignore until something tests me.

But who wants to think about the cracks?  Surely it will stop raining soon.