Wednesday, October 28, 2020
The Light
The Light of Christ
The Light of Christ that is the Life of the Universe
God’s Son, Much Greater Than Our Sun
Psalm 18:32
God who girded me with strength, … made my way safe.
1 Corinthians 3:11
No one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
Building a house is a tremendous experience. If one did not have to have the extremely fraught financial limits and stresses it would be more than tremendous, and that already while building, not first decades later – when the stress and pains and angst have subsided in one’s memory and the finished result, so well built, remains still to this day.
The challenge for one who has never built a house before is that from the first few steps to the last piece of trim nailed into place, every step builds on the previous one’s.
I brought the power into the middle of the building. The thing was I did not know that I could not do that above ground, in the building itself! So after the foundation was poured I had to dig the trench for the power cable from the pole, to the foundation – through the weeping tile rocks that I had to dig in after the foundation was poured, since I did not know about them either! All that was done with a backhoe.
Inside the foundation, whereas before the foundation was poured the trench could have been dug with the backhoe, now I got to dig in the hardpan clay a 20 foot 18″ deep trench by hand. When the cable was laid, on top crushed rock I put in by hand having hauled them in with a wheel barrow, along with the water line and a spare water line just in case, and an empty 4″ pipe in case I had forgot or had to redo something, then I got to fill in the trench by hand as well, first with crushed rock and then with clay, tamping it down so the eventual insulation under the cement floor with heating pipes in it would not heave if the ground there got wet or (God forbid) the ground there froze!
Then I got to redo the weeping tile and rocks above the trench outside.
Then we moved on to build the foam blocks to hole the rebar and concrete for the walls up to the rafters, and to pour the upper floor concrete to hold the in floor heating pipes. Solid, a great mass that a geothermal furnace kept warm in the coldest of times that stayed cool in the all but the longest hot days of summer. It all sat on the foundation we poured, that with only a 6 foot level was at most an inch out of absolute level, which was less than the foam blocks settled when the weight of the concrete was poured into them. The rafters were no more than a half inch out – but that was luck with the walls settling … and the skill of the one man who helped pour and finish the top of the upper wall.
Practical and easy to describe and see: everything in building needs be done in the right order. The foundation (not without disastrous cost) cannot be redone. Everything depends on what is done before, and everything depends on a solid foundation.
Christ as the foundation is as rock solid as God, and cannot be replaced.
On Christ the whole of creation, the entire universe (or multi-verse if that’s how we see it now) is built on Christ.
Why? How is that?
God designed us humans to run on self sacrifice and love, while we have the choice to be selfish, cruel and destructive to each other as well.
Christ, the embodiment of self-sacrificial, unconditional love, sits at the heart of everything in the universe. Try to rip that out and replace it with anything else and the whole universe would crumble.
It would be no different than the concrete walls of our home that would have cracked and crumbled if one tried to remove the foundation to lay in a new one!
I did not build with only my skill or knowledge. I had a friend, a wheel chair bound 83 year old builder and designer, who helped with the engineering and who made the construction plans for the house from my rough designs.
We live our lives, one day at a time, building a collection which is us.
Christ, unconditional, self-sacrificing love, is how we are designed to live.
But oh how we choose other, to our own pain, cost, and destruction … and we almost always take down a whole lot of other people with us.
And then Christ steps in, to forgive, redeem, and renew us for yet another day of living in God’s Grace!
A living, forgiving, life infusing foundation … God built well!
No freezing cold of hate, nor searing heat of evil and hell can disrupt God’s well designed and laid foundation.
Covid 19, nor the idiocies the pandemic exposes, nor corruption at the highest levels can disrupt God’s creation build on Christ the foundation of life.
Breathe easy, just not someone else’s contaminated air droplets or aerosol.