Always in Over My Head
The past couple years have brought great blessings to my family. After six years of patient preparation, we’ve finally begun resurrecting the 1821 cape house we dismantled together. This frame has been a joy to restore with my wife and boys and a few close friends. We are actually joining two old frames (one built in 1821 and the other in 1834). It’s a long story (one I’ve chronicled in the most recent issue of M&T), but in short, our entire 2022 was dedicated to this massive project. The first half of the year was about reshuffling our life. First, we finished off small a timber-framed cottage on the property and moved into it. Then, we sold the manufactured home we’d been living in the past decade. Once the manufactured home was gone, we began to resurrect the old house in that location. It was a long and arduous process of people coordination and sweat, but we were relieved to be able to raise one of the two frames on the granite before snowfall. Throughout the entire year, we’ve been documenting the process over on the M&T Daily Dispatch.
The second bit of news is that this year I’ve begun to serve as the Associate Fellow in Mechanical Arts at Greystone Theological Institute to help build and lead their new Mechanical Arts Program. I recently traveled to Greystone’s headquarters in Coraopolis, PA to attend Mark Garcia’s “Reformed Liturgics” class and participate in their annual Winter Feast. It was a delightful week of fellowship and rigorous discussion. I’ve recently written an essay on Greystone’s blog, Wince + Sing, which I’ve entitled, “Wisdom Through Callouses: Lessons from a Life in Woodworking” – it’s message is along the lines of the questions pondered on The Work of Our Hands. Readers of this blog may find it of interest:
“Augustine taught us to look for “traces of the Trinity” (Vestigia Trinitatis) in the things that God has made. Herman Bavinck similarly wrote in Reformed Dogmatics that “In the light of Scripture, both creation and providence also exhibit traces of God’s threefold existence . . . Christians, equipped with the spectacles of Scripture, see God in everything and everything in God.”³ When biblically literate, God’s children, through engagement with creation and providence, come to know more fully their Triune God. They become apprentices under the paideia of the Master Craftsman, the carpenter from Nazareth who is the eternal Wisdom of God (Prov 8:22-31, Lk 11:49, Mt 23:34).”
I am grateful for these developments in the past year. In regard to my work and research, I always feel in over my head, which is half the fun, I suppose. So, thank you everyone for your emails and interest in this site – I have no intention to ever abandon it, though I trust it will remain only sporadically updated, as the Lord allows. I appreciate your prayers for this work.
Blessings,
Joshua