On our daily walks, we have been entertained with the construction crew who has been repaving our road. First, they had to scrap down the road that had been previously laid down. A process called skimming, which we found out about because of a kind worker who was willing to explain this process to my four-year-old. For almost a week, the road sat skimmed and bumpy. We have two skinned knees to document that phase.
As we walked on that bumpy road I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Is this all they are going to do? Is this the final product because I think what we had before was better than this.”
It has taken two more weeks to put down the new road, but when we walked on it the difference was noticeable in the way the stroller’s wheels glided smoothly along the surface. It was a smoothness you can feel in your knees and joints.
I was thinking about how if we had been in “normal times” I would have been annoyed by how long it was taking for the road to be repaved because we would have been in our car running back and forth to here and there. We would have waited as they allowed one lane of traffic by. We would have been inconvenienced.
But these non-normal times have allowed us to look closely at the way new roads are made. First, what was there has to be scraped away leaving a rocky, bumpy surface. Isn’t this where we are now as we are sheltering in place trying to figure out how to be connected, how to learn, and how to work?
We are waiting for the new road. We are waiting for what will be created. We are waiting for the smooth surface.
This is not an easy process. We watched as the asphalt was poured into the paver and how that asphalt was heated to a temperature so hot that steam rose into the sky. Then the roller came pressuring the asphalt into place. And finally, the brusher truck came to brush away all of the tiny pieces of asphalt that didn’t make it into the new road.
Certainly, there is heat and pressure in our circumstances. This is not easy. Creating new life never is, but now that I have walked on the nice smooth road, I don’t want to go back to the makeshift road we had.
May God grant us patience to wait and strength to transform into something new in the midst of all the heat and pressure.