When my wife and I got married, we moved into one of her grandfather’s little rental houses.  It wasn’t much and it needed a lot of work.  We worked off a lot of rent by making some upgrades to the property.  After the projects were completed, the house looked better and better.

We lived in this house while I was in law school.  Actually, my wife lived there and I went to law school in North Carolina.  I lived there on the weekends.  So the weekends and school breaks were my opportunities to fix-up the house.  It started on the outside with new vinyl siding and a driveway.  Then landscaping.  We ripped up old bushes and planted new shrubs and flowers.  Added beds and mulch; brought in a lot of top soil and planted grass.  After the outside was fixed up, we worked on the inside.

We re-did the kitchen cabinets, put in tile floors in the kitchen and bathroom, installed a new shower and repainted almost everything.  One of the last detail items to finish was the crown molding in the kitchen and the bathroom.   Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I just bought the little decorative corner pieces at Home Depot that were supposed to make crown molding easy and not require any mitre cuts.  Those didn’t work as easy as they were supposed to.  Actually, they looked awful in our house.  So they came down.

I talked to a guy at church who builds houses and he said, “oh, crown molding is easy, you just turn the board upside down and backwards and it’s done.”

Hmmm…upside down and backwards.  I tried every combination of upside down and backwards I could imagine and still could never get it to come out right.  It was supposed to be so beautiful, but was just plain ugly.

I got to thinking about this some more recently.  God made us is His image, Genesis 1: 27:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

He intended for us to be beautiful – a fine piece of craftsmanship.  But we are all “ugly” in some way.  Romans 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.  No matter what we do ourselves, every time we “make a cut upside down and backwards” the crown molding of our lives just look messed up.  Jesus Christ is the master carpenter who makes all things new and makes all things beautiful.  Do you know Him?