Polishing Diamonds

Ever notice how cool and exciting things eventually become mundane? You know, something that you were so excited about once is now just a ho-hum part of your everyday life.

I'll never forget how excited I was in the weeks leading up to the purchase of our first house. We'd been married for 5 years, all of which had been spent living in rented apartments. Our daughter was 18 months old, Amy was not working, and I was in graduate school and working a full time job at City Hall for a mediocre salary. So our home-buying hopes were not high. But then the real estate swell started really picking up steam (yes it led to the infamous big crash of 2008, but this was before all that) and we suddenly were able to not only qualify for, but to actually afford to buy a house.

I was so excited about our first little house! Big yard for the kids, no walls shared with noisy neighbors, a piece of ground we could call our own. I was flying high the whole day we moved in, and waking up that first morning in our own house was just cool.

But over time the euphoria, predictably, declined. A year after we moved in, waking up in our own house was just... waking up. I no longer felt pleasure at having my own walls. And while the yard was still nice for the kids to play in, it was also a lot of work to mow each week! Don't get me wrong: we were happy with our house. But the early sense of excitement we'd had had diminished, because the comparison with what we'd had before had been long forgotten.

This happens in our relationship with God as well. One of the reasons we may feel less than enthusiastic about him is that we've forgotten just what we have in Christ. And maybe remembering how great a thing he is, and how great a life and future he's secured for us, is the path to appreciating him more fully rather than taking him for granted.

Sometimes a diamond shines better after it's been scrubbed and polished. And sometimes our appreciation for the beauty of Christ increases when we scrub off layers of accumulated familiarity. That's the subject of an article I wrote, which was inspired by a trip Amy and I took to Astoria a few years ago. You can read it at the Colson Center: Appreciating Magnificence