When I was growing up I had the privilege of helping my dad restore an old house that my mom was going to use for her frame shop and art gallery, Fine Line Designs. Now notice that I just said it was a privilege. I didn't exactly feel that way when I was actually working on it.
You see, because of my size there were a lot of things that were just easier for me to do. It was easier for me to crawl through the holes to get underneath the house to work on the plumbing. It was easier for me to squeeze through the hole that led to the attic, so that I could run electrical wiring and work on the gas lines we were installing. Now it's not that my dad couldn't fit, it was just easier for me to do it.
There are a lot of things I learned over the course of working on that old house. Of course I learned a lot about working with my hands. I also learned a few other things which have stuck with me until today.
It was one of the days not long after we had just started working on the house. I remember thinking that the "fun" had ended, because there was no more brick to demolish from the front porch. Over time, the area where the porch had been would be transformed into a "sun-room", but before we could do that the floors in the front of the house had to be leveled.
The house was just like any older house. After 80 or 90 years the foundation begins to settle. Unfortunately it settles at different heights in different places. It was going to be my job to crawl underneath the house and start leveling things out.
Now before you think my dad was a "slave-driver" (a term we affectionately called him at the time), realize that he did the first couple spots so that I knew what I 
As I was working along, though, I remember that I was being a little haphazard in the way I was setting up those extra supports. I wasn't giving any particular care as to how things looked under there. I thought as long as the work seemed to hold its weight, I was doing alright. Some of the supports that I had built up were pretty ugly.
It's about that time that my dad poked his head underneath the house and looked around. I remember him looking at a couple of the spots I had been working on and saying the following:
"Son, you need to fix some of those up. What if somebody were to come along after you and look at that? Have a little pride in your work!"
I thought he was crazy. Who is going to come along and look at what I had done underneath the house? After a moment of thought, though, I realized something. I don't know whether you have ever been underneath a house built in the late 1800's or early 1900's, but the underside of these homes didn't get much respect. In fact, much of the building waste was simply pushed underneath the home and buried there. The whole time I had been crawling around through the mess that someone else had left behind.
Would someone else ever see my work? Well, I was seeing the work of the men were who had built the house! I don't think they ever imagined that I would be crawling around looking at the underbelly of their handiwork. That's why they didn't mind leaving quite a mess behind under the house!
Sometimes people do things that they think no one else is going to see. They are thoroughly convinced that the things that they do in the privacy of their own home will never come to light. We especially buy into this in our country. "What a man does in his own home is his own business and nobody else's" I once heard a man I knew say. It's this line of thought that causes us to relax on our righteousness when we think no one will ever see what we have done. People bury their spiritual "trash" in a place that they think no one will find it instead of disposing of it properly.
Moses warns the tribes of Gad and Reuben in Numbers 32:23 that if they fail to follow through on their promise to help take the land of Canaan that their sin would "find them out". In other words, there would be consequences. This is a general rule about sin. The Israelites didn't even make it past Ai before they figured this out. Ironically, a man (Achan) had tried to do the same thing that the builders of my mom's frame shop did with the things they didn't want people to see: Hide them under a house! Achan hid the things he had stolen from the Lord in the earth in his tent (Joshua 7:20-21). I would imagine that he never thought anyone would know about or miss these things. Boy was he wrong!
Can we always strive to have the highest character possible? That means doing what's right even when we think no one will see the trash or consequences of our sin. The next time that you think you can get away with something, the next thought needs to be the realization that you can't.
1 Corinthians 4:5, ESV – "Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God."
Hebrews 4:13, ESV – "And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account."
-Daniel Howell
[...] to have it as exact as possible [we'll save the lesson on excellence for another time, but for now, you can read this]. If I recall correctly, my job was to somehow fit a shim of some sort underneath the joists we had [...]
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