I posted this at my home, but I figured I'd post it here so you'd understand why I was rediculously vehement about the faith/morality post a couple weeks back:

Once upon a time, there was a young man named Steve who had lived all of his life in one village in one house. He liked the house and it had served him well, but he decided he wanted to look at other houses and see if there were better ones out there. He started looking far and wide and saw many homes. Eventually two nice men decided to show Steve their home and they told Steve about all the great things it offered. Steve had to admit it looked like a solid home and offered some nice features that Steve really liked as well as also having a lot in common with the house he grew up in. There were a couple points when Steve though he saw defects or cockroaches out of the corner of his eye, but as he turned to look, one of the men would start talking to him and Steve would get distracted. The men asked Steve to go and make the home buying decision based on his gut instancts and Steve agreed. He had always made decisions like this based off of careful analysis and he rather liked the idea of basing this decision off of how he felt instead. Somehow it felt more important and more real to him. In the end, Steve decided to get the same model home that his new friends had.

He moved in and got used to the surroundings. He began to feel comfortable in the house and the more he time he spent in the house, the better he felt about his purchase. He would often be amazed to find a new feature in his home that he had not even realized was there. He was very happy.

But one day, after living in the house for a couple years he decided to explore the attic, which was a room he had never been in before. In the attic he saw termites and strange construction and many things that made him question the soundness of the house. He talked to his friends about it and they said that they had known what he would find, but that they had chosen not to share it because he did not need to know about it at the time. They advised Steve to go back into the attic and that if he did so and had faith, that he would see that the workmanship was really quite fine and that the attic was yet another great thing to love about the house and not something to cause unease. They also said that if Steve worked on doing maintenance (eg watersealing the deck) on the house that it would keep the house and his appreciation of it in good shape.

Steve thought there was some logic in the advice that his friends gave him. He did continue doing doing maintence and became even more vigilant about it than he was before. However, he could not convince himself to go back into the attic. He kept thinking that if he did so that he would become completely disatisfied with the house and that that would leave him in a quandry. Thus he went day after day ignoring the attic, yet keenly aware of it. It began to weigh on his opinions of the whole house. Sudenly, the seeming firm foundation began to seem shoddy.

Steve did not see things improving and did not know what to do. Should he continue trying to make things work in his new house, should he move back to his old house, should he try to find a new house which had some of the features he liked from this house? Steve wasn't sure. He knew that he did not want to be homeless, but he wasn't sure where to go. He talked to his friends Chris and Rachel who had both spent some time in Steve's house and they gave him some interesting thoughts. Chris said that there are many houses out there and perhaps one of them was nicer than Steve's current house. Chris infact was looking for a new house himself and offered to look with Steve. Steve had to agnowledge the truth of Chris' statement and thought Chris' offer was very nice. However, Steve also realized that his friend Chris moved an awful lot and that was not the life that Steve was looking for.

Rachel on the other hand had spent her whole life in the Same model house that Steve owned and she tried to help Steve feel better about the house and the purchase and pointed out that the house really wasn't as much of a fixer-upper as Steve was thinking. Steve also agreed with her and saw that there were only a few areas of the house that really gave him pause, the biggest of which was still the attic.

As Steve pondered, he also though about some words spoken by his friend Lee who had grown up in the same model house, but had moved out and was currently living with his family on the street. Steve did not want to live on the street, but thought that if he moved out of his house without a new house lined up to move into, that he too could end up without shelter. Still even that would be a home of sorts, if not the one Steve wished for. The biggest fear that Steve faced was at not having any place in the world that he could call home. He had always had a place to live, but now he couldn't decide where he should go and there was no place that really felt like home to him.

Thus far he had been getting along alright living in the seemingly rundown house. The house was everpresent, but he could also ignore his house during day to day life. He did not want to do anything rash and did not want to rush such an important decision as where to live. He also remembered paying a lot of money to purchase the house initially and did not wish to lose that investment if he later discovered this house did indeed suit his needs. Yet he knew somewhere along the way, he would have to figure out a more permanent plan.