...remade, for good

We are called to be God’s people, showing by our lives his grace,

one in heart and one in spirit, sign of hope for all the race.

Let us show how he has changed us and remade us as his own;

let us share our lives together as we shall around his throne.

---Thomas A. Jackson, 1973

In a new year’s effort to loosen the grip of the 24-hour news cycle on my attention (and life), I have been watching (less contentious) house-flipping and home renovation shows on HGTV and DIY networks. These are the shows where homeowners or professional renovators take tired, dated houses and turn them into places anyone would be proud to call home. The renovators have one goal in mind—to ‘flip’ the home for a hefty profit if they are professionals, to create a cozy family gathering place if they are handy homeowners.

In this hymn, Thomas Jackson imagines God as our re-modeler, creating something ‘one’ out of something scattered, disparate. In this wordplay, God is recreating us as a home, as a family, as a reflection and a sign.

In his work 1939 ‘Life Together’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity.

God has remade us, for this life together, forever, for good.