Five years ago, Christian social critic Os Guinness and his wife had their McLean, Virginia, home tested for hidden mold. The result of that test was a massive, house-flipping project that the couple is just now completing.
The real kicker? The amount Guiness spent to repair the house is only $500 less than the property’s original value, the Wall Street Journal reports.
According to the WSJ, the ongoing project cost $478,500 in renovations–not including what Guinness and his wife lost in possessions that had been infested with mold.
Among the damaged items were many books in Guinness’s annotated collection. “He threw out roughly one-third to one-half of them … and the rest have to be hand-cleaned individually by running a vacuum over the spine and sides,” the WSJ reports.
But Guiness told the WSJ that the “harder sacrifice” was his sense of rootlessness, being displaced and splitting time between the U.K. and the U.S.
Guinness, who serves as senior fellow at the Trinity Forum in McLean, knows about long journeys home: He authored a book titled Long Journey Home: A Guide to Your Search for the Meaning of Life in 2001 and lived for 10 years in the Buddhist culture. He told CT in a 2002 interview that the idea of life as a journey is “one of the most universal pictures of human life.” CT also interviewed Guinness last summer and discussed how “American Christians should work to sustain the American experiment.”
