Jennifer Blacklock

We’ve coined the last couple months “smell-tastrophy” (or something to that effect; you’ll get different versions depending on which family member you ask). It started with the mold (which is a continuing situation)- I kept thinking I smelled something like an old forgotten citrus and had the kids help me empty and re-shelf the entire pantry searching for it. I pulled out the oven and dishwasher all to no avail. Finally we found the source of the smell, and sure enough, it was indeed mold.

We live in about the driest place on earth (a slight exaggeration, but not by much), so mold in the walls is thankfully nearly impossible, but by an unfortunate series of events, our fridge had been slowly but steadily leaking without our knowledge. So pulling out that final appliance revealed what we thought to be a tiny bit of mold along the floor/wall seam. We bleached it, only to continue to smell it; Justin took out the bottom portion of drywall to reveal mold on the studs, took them out, kept smelling it; we cut further into the wall and found it had seeped through to the outer wall of the pantry; we took the pantry apart and the wall apart, replaced all the studs, bleached the heck out of everything, replaced moldy boards of the pantry, went under the house and removed questionable insulation, bleached under there and finally… still smell mold.

Yes, present tense.

I have prayed fervently that God will reveal the remaining mold to us. In all this (unprofessional) removal, I’m sure we’ve dislodged about a zillion mold spores into the air, and, coincidentally or probably not, have had several repeated head colds, coughs, etc.; amazingly God has given me peace. I would be very likely to freak out about this type of unhealthy thing, and I thank God for His peace that surpasses understanding. And still… I want this mold gone! So I’ve prayed fervently, and I think the likely place is the floor… so, we may not have a kitchen floor after this weekend, we’ll see how it goes after pulling up a few tiles.

A silver lining in all this is that, to avoid breathing the mold, we’ve spent more time than usual outside together, which has been really nice. School in the bright morning sun, lots of free play. The weather during this season is perfect for having dinner outside, and since baseball is still the big obsession around here, most evenings also include a game of catch.

Besides the mold, one afternoon as I should’ve been enjoying a lovely evening watching the kids run in the golden light, I couldn’t help but be bothered by a slight dead-animal smell seeming to come faintly from under the house. When I opened the crawl space door, whew- not so faint anymore- I was overwhelmed by the smell of definitely rotting flesh.

Coincidentally (or not, as I’m realizing nothing is coincidence with the brilliant God we serve), the kids and I had just read that morning in our favorite kids’ devotional, Indescribable, about a certain rare tropical flower, corpse flower, that smells like rotting flesh; the analogy was hypocrisy- looking good on the outside but being foul inside, as Jesus accused the pharisees of being (see Matthew 23).

I couldn’t help but think that maybe God was really driving in that point. Hypocrisy is something I struggle with, I think many Christians, especially in America, do.

I found the dead thing (it made me even more sick to my stomach than the smell to discover that it was one of our chickens that had somehow become trapped under the house), and removed it, acutely aware of the harshness of Jesus’s accusation of the pharisees and teachers of the law being “whitewashed tombs”, and of how seriously God takes hypocrisy. It’s as ugly as a painted tomb.

Our wall looked fine on the surface. White. Clean. Our house looked fine on the outside. But inside that clean looking wall and underneath that neat and tidy looking exterior was decay.

Hypocrisy looks good- it looks like righteousness but isn’t honest.

This can be especially destructive in parenting, and our kids are the ones who see it the most from us- we limit movies and TV for their well-being but waste time scrolling on our smart phones, or we yell angrily for them to be kind to their sibling. Demanding the right thing from them while not practicing it ourselves will surely produce resentment in them at the very least and will probably form them into hypocrites as well.

The solution to this is Jesus, of course. Recognizing and being changed by His grace, His call to repentance, His sacrifice. Believing that Jesus is the only way to life and letting God change us little by little to be more like Jesus (Romans 8:29).

James 1:22-25 says “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.”

So, smell-tastrophy month continues (hopefully with an end in sight), but I’m thankful that God is here no matter what, working and teaching. I’ll be here, trying to practice what I preach and let God change me from the inside out.