Pungent Problem (Part Two)

When we came home from church two Sundays ago and entered our smelly house, we could not stand the stench any longer.  Caroline and I helpfully fled to our upstairs bedrooms while Mom and Dad tackled the problem practically. 

My parents found the odiferous wall in which the animal must have died.  After moving an entire bookcase to get to the interior wall, they prepared to cut into it, extract the smelly critter, and be done with the whole ordeal.  When they finished sawing into the wall of our finished basement, they saw… nothing.  The foul odor was clearly coming from that wall, but nothing was there.  What were we to do?

After taking a break from the basement, Dad returned to clean up the saw.  That is when he noticed that the basement carpet was just slightly damp.  So, instead of tearing our walls apart, we began ripping up carpet. 

Somehow, water was getting into the basement and soaking our 18-year-old carpet pad.  (In case you have not guessed, the resulting aroma is far from pleasant!)  A neighbor helped us figure out where the water was coming from when he saw paint peeling from a wall.  Interestingly, it was on the opposite side of the room from the wall in which Mom and Dad had made a hole.  An exterior faucet on the level above had leaked earlier that week, as evidenced by the water that began pouring through the basement ceiling when Dad turned it on the following day to double-check.

We spent that Sunday evening ripping up foul-smelling carpet.  (Meanwhile, I was terribly disappointed that I could not post my blog post about something dying since nothing had actually died!)  Although the project took hours, it felt wonderful to get the smell out of our house. 

Extracting the carpet meant that everything on top of the carpet had to move – plastic bins, 6 full bookcases, a desk… have I mentioned that we have too much stuff?  That was a powerful reminder to me to not hold onto spiritual junk!  As Matthew 16:25 says, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”  Am I continually holding every aspect of my life loosely enough to let go of it, in obedience, in an instant?  A short way into the night, I was convinced that most of the items I hauled from one room into the other were more bother than they were worth.  Spiritually, anything we have to lug around that would slow down our pursuit of Jesus is worthless.  “Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.” (Phil. 3:8)

As we finished the task, we began to see the hidden blessing.  We had been working for nearly a year to get our basement fixed up as a second living space with special furniture from Dad’s parents’ estate.  We were almost ready to replace the basement carpet as the final touch.  If the carpet had been soaked far into the main room, our family furniture would have been water-damaged.  (All but one of our bookshelves in the other room were damaged, though the other furniture had plastic sliders – another blessing!)  The carpet was wet into the main room, but stopped just short of the furniture from grandparents.  Nothing of any sentimental value was damaged… but the carpet in every room was water-damaged.  Insurance will cover the damage to our walls and hopefully cover the cost of new carpet for much, if not all, of our basement! 

Our house stank last week, but nothing had died.  Why then did I write a whole blog post on death?  As Mom observed, “Stagnant water smells like death.”  Our basement was filled with hidden, stagnant water!  We are supposed to be filled with living water, not stagnant water! 

Jesus declared, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:38)  What is flowing out of our lives – living water or putrid death?  May Jesus be the aroma of our whole lives!