Becoming a Shovel-Ready Person

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CONSECRATION

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. 

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.

Jesus, we belong to you. 

Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. 

THE WORD OF THE LORD

Proverbs 9:1 NIV

Wisdom has built her house;
    she has set up its seven pillars.

CONSIDER THIS . . .

While we are always working to make a home, our family actually built a house once. Anyone who has ever done this knows it takes great wisdom to build a house. Why? It requires one to make a thousand small, highly consequential decisions that will have permanent impact. Making these decisions means projecting oneself out into the future and imagining the day-to-day practical ways a family aspires to live together and the kind of home they want to create. From family life areas to bedrooms to dining facilities to the kitchen and guest rooms to front porches and back decks and on it goes. Then there’s lighting and paint and plumbing fixtures and . . . and . . . and . . . 

As the saying goes, you build the house and then the house builds you. The thing that matters most, however, is the part that no one ever sees: the footings. I remember visiting the construction site (as one endlessly does) with my kids in the early days when there was nothing but the footings. It seemed to take forever to get this part done. These pilings would become the unseen pillars on which the whole house sat. We would walk around them together saying simple prayers for a firm foundation for our home, in every sense of the word.

Wisdom has built her house; 
    she has set up its seven pillars.

It’s got me thinking about the pillars or pilings or footings of my life. What are they? I could name off some high-sounding ideals that capture what I want them to be, like the Word of God, the Spirit of God, humility, and love. While listing them would be a good exercise, they would be worth about the price of the paper they were written on.

In order to know the pilings and pillars of my life, I would need to look at today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday. Did I steep myself in the Word of God? Did I consciously welcome the Holy Spirit into my inmost being? Was humility anything more than a high ideal? Was I intentional about reaching out to other people and serving them beyond my own self-interest in doing so? Or were those days, like so many others, just another jammed-up amalgamation of hectic busy-ness, undisciplined eating, and frenetic swimming around trying to keep my head above the water and pay the bills? 

The houses of our lives will not be built on the pillars and pilings of wisdom unless our days are built on them. This is very easy to want to do, but it’s even easier to not do at all.

My unsolicited advice? Start small. Forget seven pillars. Start with one. For instance, how will I stand on the Word of God today? It will not just happen. I have to dig a new footing every single day.

Got your shovel ready?

PRAYER