No Cracks

A cracked foundation is no laughing matter. We’ve been dealing with one recently.

My grandson is seven years old and one of his favorite Christmas gifts was a large and extravagant Legos castle. With his dad’s help, he assembled this spectacular edifice in less than a week. He was proud of his masterpiece and we were impressed with the quality of his work.

Then came the post-Christmas “let’s get the house back in order” day when it was time to move his masterpiece from the front room to his bedroom. He prepared for this castle relocation project by carefully placing the structure in a box. During the move he dropped the box and after hours and days of hard work, his masterpiece crumbled to pieces in an instant.

Fighting back tears, he placed the box of broken pieces at my feet and asked for help. I am not a structural engineer by any stretch of the imagination and fixing things is not high on my list of life skills. He was hoping that his grandma could repair the damage and restore his creation. I was quite confident I would not be much help at all.

So I did the one thing I knew I was good at - I sat down beside him on the floor and gave him a big hug. Then something interesting happened. As I held him in my arms, I looked at the largest chunk of the broken Lego castle and noticed a crack on the far side of the floor piece and it occurred to me that this cracked foundation was the primary source of the problem.

I reconnected the broken floor piece to the rest of the foundation and suddenly realized that for the most part, the castle had simply broken in two. Once the crack was repaired and the foundation was back in place, it was easy to see how everything else fit into place. My grandson’s castle creation was restored to its original beauty in less than 10 minutes.

The obvious moral of this life lesson is that once the foundation is restored, the rest of the pieces fall into place. As I explained what had happened and how important it is to start with a good foundation, I heard God’s still small voice talking to me.

I was suddenly aware of my recent struggle with feeling that my life is falling apart – that huge parts of my life are crumbling and things I’ve been comfortable with for years lay in pieces on the floor. I realized it was time for a foundation inspection – time to discover any cracks in the foundation of my relationship with God. I remembered that unless I repair these cracks and reconnect to my rock solid foundation everyday, the broken pieces of my life will remain in a shattered state of “unfixable” chaos.

As is often the case, God used my seven year old grandson to teach me the lesson I was trying to teach him. Here’s to a rock solid foundation with no cracks in 2011.