Our house has a 185-foot retaining wall that starts at the edge of our front yard and curves around to end at the edge of the back yard. At its tallest, it stands eight feet and some odd inches. There is a gradual step-up at the beginning and end. Not a small feature by any means, and yet I didn’t give it a lot of thought when we bought the house. Maybe it’s because I only saw pictures of it until we actually moved in. You see, I didn’t get eyes on our property until the day we arrived with all our belongings. But that’s another story.
Even after living in our home for a time, the wall didn’t get much of my attention. Although the house was built in 1994, there wasn’t much for landscaping—just rolling green hills, a thicket of trees separating our property from the one next door, and the occasional boxwood. It was as we began to re-imagine the yard with a patio overhang and flower beds that the blight of that wall became apparent.
Built of gray cinder blocks, it’s covered with a layer of non-de script tan stucco, which is peeling off in big chunks, leaving gaping areas of the gray. The perfect environment for creepy-crawlies and mold to thrive. Chris and I gave serious thought to re-stuccoing it ourselves. We even asked the contractor working on our patio overhang his opinion. He figured if I could texture the walls in our house so easily, I could do the wall. We bought tools to scrape away the old stucco, but that’s as far as we got. The more we looked at it, the more massive the job grew. And the more we did to beautify our backyard, the uglier the wall became.
Then we met Andy. He’s a good ol’ local boy who grew up in the South. Born in Kentucky, he has called Lewisburg his home for a number of years. Andy works with brick and stone, and although he might not look like it, he’s an artist. For fifty years, Andy’s bricked and stoned houses, fireplaces, barbecues, and whatever else you can imagine. He’s done waterfalls, swimming pools, and ponds. And he’s changing our blight-of-a-wall into a work of beauty.
The job, which was predicted to take about three weeks, is going into week five. Partly because there have been unforeseen issues (the wall isn’t near level), partly because I asked for a water feature to be added in, and partly because Andy isn’t in any hurry. Fortunately, we aren’t either. Each of the 8,460 bricks he installs aren’t actually being mortared onto the wall face but stacked onto a footing and then bricked over the top of the existing wall. It’s a painstaking job, and one that might bore most people. But not Andy. He checks each line to be sure it’s level—brick by brick—because he says he’s not about to put his name on anything that isn’t his best.
“I’ll do you a beautiful wall,” He said. “I’m not braggin’. It’s the honest fact.” I could listen to his slow, southern drawl all day long. And if we stand outside with him long enough, we will, too. He has a fascinating story, which I would love to fictionalize. He’s worked for the likes of Randy Travis and many other muckety-mucks in the Nashville area, yet our “little” job wasn’t beneath him.
As I’ve been watching Andy work, I got such a visual of sanctification. The old, ugly wall is like our hearts before the Lord started His work on them. The perfect environment for all manner of darkness and sin. Andy, like the Lord, takes painstaking care over every brick he lays. Our God works in our lives, hour by hour, day by day to recreate our hearts so they eventually resemble perfection Himself—Jesus Christ. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17) The ugliness is still there, deep down, but we’re covered by the blood of Christ. Of course, the Lord’s work won’t truly be done until we leave this world and join Him in heaven. At this rate, Andy’s might not be, either.
Just kidding. But I did tell him if he’s still here at Christmas, I’ll set a place at the supper table for him. It’s just how we roll here in the South.
