Just A Shell?

This is a picture of our house, being built.  It is the house we currently live in now.  I recently set it up as a desk top wall paper.  I found myself starring at it one day and realizing that it was simply a shell.  Not because it was lacking brick and siding and windows and doors but because it was lacking life.  Then like that scene from Titanic when the old rose sees a video of the sunken ship and see all the life that took place at that place on the ship.... it started to happen.  I saw the driveway filled with cars of my friends from small group.  I see through the wall in the back of the garage where our family room now is, and I see 48 of my friends jumping up and down at a Superbowl party when the giants won.  And none of us were giants fans. I look through the front door and see into the morning room on the back of the house and see all of us sitting and playing monopoly or the counter top piled with desserts from Spaghetti Sundays!.  The big window upstairs in the loft where a friends little boy can be seen with his Indiana Jones hat playing the Wii. Or the bump out window where two friends started dating over a chess game and are now married.  But it's just a shell right?  Hardly, it is the hub of dreams and relationships.  It's a place where we do life with each other. It's the place where you mourn the death of your friend and celebrate the life of your friend's newborn.  Then I started to see this house as our lives.  We have dream and disappointments.  We have plans and tragedies.  But what makes these shells so powerful is the life that lives in them.  For me that live is Jesus.  He is the meaningful relationship, the fun, the dreams and also the pain of realizing that I'm not the man I should be and I have to learn a lesson all over again.  I guess the writer's block moment is to remind me that it's the life we do with people and vulnerability that comes from those relationships that makes the moments in these shells, so powerful.  Sure someday we'll sell this house and move our family somewhere else.  But then next time I have a photo that looks like this of my house, I will be filled with excitement for the life that is about to be lived in the new shell. I will however, tend to this shell of mine that is 45 years old now, and hopefully has a lot more life to live.  I'll approach my life like this photo of a my house.  That there is still so much more that God wants to do with it and I should look forward to the unexpected.