Steel Sticking Out of the Roof: Living Faithfully in a House Built in Stages

Travel through almost any Caribbean district and you will see them: houses with steel rods reaching up from the roof like the stems of a plant that has not yet flowered. Some have a finished ground floor with curtains in the windows and a car in the yard. Some are still grey block, the window openings covered with board. Some have been that way for so long that vines have climbed the steel. Each one is a family’s plan, paused.

Outsiders sometimes see those rods as a sign of failure. People who grew up around them know better. They are a sign of intention. Somebody is saving. Somebody means to come back to this.

The cocoon stage

There is an old illustration about a caterpillar in its cocoon. From outside, nothing seems to be happening. It hangs in the dark, apparently stuck. And yet everything is changing, and when the time comes the butterfly has to push its own way out.

Building in stages can feel like the cocoon. Months, sometimes years, pass with nothing visible added. The family lives in two rooms while the plans on paper show five. Relatives abroad ask when it will be finished. Neighbours make remarks. It is easy to feel stuck, even ashamed.

Strength made perfect in weakness

Paul knew what it was to ask for something to change and not see it happen. Three times he pleaded with the Lord to remove what he called a thorn in the flesh. The answer came back, in the New King James wording: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

That is not the answer most of us want when we are staring at an unfinished upper floor. We want the money to arrive and the slab to be thrown. But Paul’s discovery was that the waiting place, the place of weakness, was exactly where God’s strength showed itself most clearly. He did not wait for his circumstances to change before he could live faithfully. He learned to live faithfully in them.

Pressing forward, one room at a time

Elsewhere Paul writes of forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, pressing on toward the goal (Philippians 3:13–14). There is a practical wisdom in how families press forward on a house built in stages, and it overlaps with faith more than we might think:

• Finish before you expand. A fully finished, secure ground floor is a better home than a large, half-built shell. Complete what you have started before breaking new ground.
• Protect what is waiting. Exposed steel rusts and exposed block weathers. Ask your builder how to protect them between stages, so the next phase does not begin with repairs.
• Keep the plans honest. Build from approved drawings that allow for the future storeys, so the foundation and columns can carry what comes later.
• Save before you build. Starting a stage without the money to finish it is how houses stay grey for a decade.
• Record each stage. Photographs and receipts help if you later seek a loan, sell or pass the house on.