A day of soft Mud-Season rain, falling gently onto the piled-up snowbanks and gritty leftover ice from the storm two weeks ago... Water's running freely down the main street downtown. Huge puddles flood the sides of the road, where the storm sewers can't keep up with the runoff. There's a sheet of water maybe five or six inches deep occupying a large part of the mall parking lot; if you drive through it, the water shoots up most satisfactorily, drenching the remaining snowbanks. Out in the country, the fields are silver with inundation. The creek is booming, and if the rivers haven't flooded out yet, it's only a matter of time--and this year (the newspaper says) it's going to be hellacious. It is wet out there.

And of course my basement is flooded. I leave my boots by the cellar stairs because I'm going to need them if I want to get to the freezer. The water's only a couple of inches deep at the worst, no big deal. It comes in near the front of the house, washes gently down to the back, and dribbles out through cracks in the old concrete floor. I have a sump pump, but it rarely works and I rarely remember it's there. It doesn't matter. We're used to this.

The basement floods after every midwinter thaw, every spring Mud Season runoff, every two-day rain, every good-sized thunderstorm. This is just a fact of life. I don't keep anything perishable in the cellar, only the freezer and the homebrew. They and the furnace and water heater are safely on dry ground, so I don't have to worry about them. My guess is that the basement has flooded like this several times a year for all the time the house has stood here, and that nobody's ever worried about it much.

Of course if this was a nice new house, I should be having conniptions: I should be hiring contractors to dig out alongside the foundation and install better drainage--even if that means sacrificing my spirea bushes. I should be waterproofing the interior walls. I should be doing all sort of things that I'm not doing. Basement flooding is low on my list of priorities. Besides, I like those spireas.

Nice new houses have perfect right angles, of which this house has none at all. Nice new houses don't need repainting; nor do their rooms have abruptly sloping floors. (One of our upstairs closet doors is actually cut at an angle to accommodate the slope.) Mind you, nice new houses also don't have huge oak rafters, or solid hemlock roofs, or woodwork like this….

It struck me that there are things about myself that are like my leaky basement--things that I know need fixing, but that I don't at the moment have the ability to fix. Doesn't mean that whatever-it-is is a good thing. We can, and should, be clear about ourselves, at all costs--especially the costs to our own tender egos. But there are also things about ourselves that, in all likelihood, we aren't going to be able to change, or at least, not right now.

We can't go back to where we were before the damage got done, or we made that first mistake, or we took this road instead of that. That's the lust for innocence, itself a serious danger. We are who we are, which is often so much less than we could have been. And some of that we can do something about, and some of it we just have to live with.

The wise man, standing in a plain white sunny country church, said something about "the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." I cannot fix my leaky basement. Realistically speaking, that's just not in the cards either now or in the foreseeable future. Anyone who wants to buy this house is going to have to buy it leaky basement at all.

What's so hard for us to accept is that God buys us where and as we are. God is far more interested in our beauty and goodness, in the courage and patience with which we confront this life, than in our weaknesses and ailments. We're so fascinated by our own (and others') negative characteristics that it's hard to remember that maybe God isn't. As Martin Smith said, "God is bored by sin."

Jesus met the woman at the well, and he looked into her eyes and saw everything there that she wanted to hold back from God--everything she wanted to conceal, because she'd been taught all her life that God hates sinners. Since she was a sinner, God must hate her, true? And something in his clear and gentle look told her God knew and loved her just exactly as she was, and that freed her to know and love God in Jesus. Maybe after that she had the courage to change the way she was living. Or maybe she had to stay where she was, enduring in patience--but in a new, radically transformed way.

What I do know is that God understands about my basement. God knows I didn't cause the problem and that I can't, right now, do much to fix it. God knows that it's probably not such a big deal, so far as the house's well-being is concerned, and that I'm not ignoring the problem--just living with it for now.

God knows us, better than we know ourselves. God knows how we got where we find ourselves now--where we were at fault, or not; what we chose or had no power to choose in. God knows us so intimately, and chooses to love us in that knowledge, just as we are--flooded basements and all.