“Wake up. I had an epiphany,” I said to my husband.
“You can’t have had an epiphany. Those only happen once or twice in your life. And you just had one two months ago.”
“And what epiphany was that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Neither do I. But I really had one today. Let’s go downstairs, get coffee, and I’ll tell you about it.” There was no point telling him anything before his first cup.
It’d been a good morning. I’d woken early and gone to the Wolf River to walk and pray. The humidity was at only 20 percent I would later be told; I just knew it was the coolest day we’d had in a long time. Perfect.
It felt good to make our coffee on this Saturday morning without the rush of most mornings. To have the time to choose our favorite mugs, sit together. Coffee in hand, we went outside, this another luxury afforded by the weather and the fact it was a holiday. Pat usually works on Saturdays.
“So, tell me about this epiphany.” I could tell he wasn’t in a hurry or distracted. It seems that the moments when we’re both in the mood to talk at the same time are as rare as this cool day in July. I’m not sure about other couples; I tend to assume they sit and talk over coffee every morning, like I assume they keep their cars filled with gas so they don’t have to race around like maniacs moving cars around because they’re already late, yelling, “Who has the keys to the Mazda?!” “I don’t know! You drove it last!”
But this morning was blessedly different, so with eagerness I began to relay my morning’s contemplations.
“You know how you’ve been working on Joanna’s floor and we’ve all been asking you why you’re doing it like that?”
Joanna’s room had had carpet that had to go. Our intent was to replace the carpet with a laminate flooring, but when Pat saw that the cat’s pee had sunk into the sub-flooring, he’d decided to pull up the entire floor and rebuild it before we laid the laminate. He’d been unhappy with the construction since we bought the house. “That’s why the upstairs squeaks so much. They just used ½” plywood and that crummy soundboard on top.”
“The squeaks don’t bother me,” I’d said. “Let’s me know somebody’s there.” I’ll come up with any justification for not doing extra work. The cat stains wouldn’t have made any difference, covered by plastic sheeting and laminate flooring. I would bet that not another man in Memphis would have decided to go to all this trouble.
It’s a huge job. A noisy, messy job. Two layers of flooring, nails galore. Backbreaking, unpleasant, unrewarding work. To my mind, a totally unnecessary job. As he’s pulling up nails and running that electric saw, yanking pieces of the offending soundboard and plywood, all I could think was, “Why?! This doesn’t matter. It’s going to take forever, and even when this is done, the rest of the upstairs will still be the same original construction. What’s really to be gained?”
This reaction is actually mild compared to my normal reactions in times past. I’ve come to accept his totally inscrutable ways over the years and don’t get nearly as upset as I used to. But I do, or did, until my epiphany, fail to understand or appreciate his perfectionism.
The coffee’s good, the sky is blue, we’re relaxed and even my bringing up the floor doesn’t bother him. “Yes, it was kind of obvious as I worked alone that nobody else had any interest in the project.”
So, there he’d been, working alone, wishing others would join in, catch the vision, but, alas, the clash and clang, the awful squeal of the saw, the sounds of construction aren’t welcoming, not conducive to conversation, not like folding clothes or chopping vegetables. I’d offer the occasional token, “Do you need any help?” to which he’d give me some small task, but then very soon I’d migrate back downstairs to do something easier, faster, something that would show, that mattered.
But the next day, on my walk, as I was praying about this and that, thinking about the floor and how long it would take, and how even Pat’s brother had looked at him like he’d lost his mind redoing that entire floor, another thought, a never-before thought came to me.
“He does things the way he does them because he has the heart of God. It’s the heart of God to do things right, to do them perfectly, to care about what’s underneath, even if it’s something that doesn’t show, that others wouldn’t notice. To renew, renovate, rebuild, and redeem are Christ-like preoccupations. You’ve wrongly concluded for years that he’s motivated by some misguided perfectionism, and you’ve judged him as being slow when in truth he in his work ethic reflects the highest and noblest and best.”
I realized that, despite others’ objections, others' ways of doing things, especially despite my protests, urgings to get him to take some reasonable shortcuts, he cannot. To do so, would be to go against his very nature. I even had the thought that his stubbornness is almost prophetic in nature, like Jeremiah or John the Baptist, men called to a certain habit of dress or lifestyle as a witness, a rebuke against the times in which they lived.
And so I came home from my walk, eager to tell him of my new perspective, to give him the recognition he has long deserved, to honor him as one who lives out the heart of God. It was with joy that my eyes were opened and even now as I write this, I can hardly believe that I used to see his work ethic with such jaundiced eyes.
The floor is now finished. It’s done right. It’s so sturdy and solid and quiet. You really can tell the difference.
