“The Stone the builders rejected has become the Cornerstone; the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes. The LORD has done it this very day; let us rejoice and be glad. LORD, save us! LORD, grant us success! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD. From the house of the LORD we bless you.”
Psalms 118: 22-26 NIV
Have you ever played Jenga? If you have, you’ve probably noticed that it only takes a few turns before the tower leans, and the work becomes precarious. In fact, I’ve seen more than one AFV episode featuring a tower falling onto someone’s head.
After years of experience watching my brothers build with LEGOS, my expert DIY father use his trial-and-error approach to home improvement projects, and watching way too many “How did they Built That” episodes on Smithsonian, I’ve noticed something.
It’s all about the foundation.
If you take a block off of the tip-top of a Jenga tower on the first turn, it’s not going to fall down (unless you’re legendarily bad at games, like me). But if you take the corner piece out of the foundational row, it’ll topple on the first turn. Just like that! And it isn’t even just about the blocks themselves, but about what the blocks are sitting on.
Back in the summer, I attended a wonderful family reunion, and we played a very special version of Jenga, in which each family member signed a block for the tower. My brother and I went up against some of the most skilled experts (AKA, the ‘cool’ cousins of my mother’s) but it was made very difficult by the fact that the tower was leaning before we even began.
Why was this?
The tower we were playing with was big and heavy, made from real wood and stacked taller than my head (we have a large family). While the first three blocks at the base definitely contributed to the safety of the tower more so than the last three at the top, it was the table in the end that made it such a high-stakes game.
The table was flimsy, and worse still, was sitting on the downward slope of a hill.
You couldn’t really tell it at first glance. It wasn’t so steep that at first whoever put the table there realized it was a bad place to put the foundation of the game. But trial and error proved that it simply was not a safe place to build our tower.
And our life is like that too.
What have you built your life on? Hopefully you said Jesus, but even if you did, do you really mean it?
What I’m trying to say is, at the end of the day, when all the other blocks of life get thrown off, what would be left for you?
We say sometimes that family is what’s most important. But even family can be taken from us. Perhaps it’s your job. Stable income is really important, vital even! But if one day the pink-slip comes where would you be? How would your mental health be?
I say this all because sometimes I’ve realized that I’m guilty of basing everything on something that can’t last.
As long as everything is OK…
As long as my family’s happy and safe…
As long as I have enough money for gas…
As long as XYZ doesn’t occur, everything will be fine.
But then when XYZ inevitably happens, when worse comes to worst, we are stuck scrambling for something to cling to. A way out of the mud, or the pit as it were.
I have had this happen to me oh-so many times! And when that corner block gets pulled out I crash into anxiety, depression, procrastination…
And what I’m slowly coming to realize as I get pulled back into the raging river that is regular life after such a peaceful break, is that I can’t let something that is not eternal be my ‘one thing.’
Now does that mean if we lose a job, a family-member, or something else dear to us we shouldn’t grieve or be upset?
Absolutely not! Grief is a part of life. Anxiety is real. Depression does happen! But what God asks of us when we become part of His family is to let Him be our cornerstone.
Over Christmas break I had my eighteenth birthday, and it was wonderful, but a lot of bad things happened to us that day. A fun trip to Nashville ended up being stressful all the way around when we left late, and then got held up in traffic for a major crash. By the time we reached home we were all hungry, tired, and I wanted a bath.
All along the way I kept on thinking, At least it’s still my birthday. And while that was true, more problems kept coming up before we finally all hit the hay. But the way I managed to still enjoy my day was not because the circumstances were great, though I would have liked that. It was because I kept finding small pieces of mercy everywhere that God sprinkled throughout my day.
A beautiful building I’d never seen before. The stars in the sky on our drive home. My aunt’s presence. Delicious Zaxbys after a long day that ended up being still warm, even though we were late. I was upset by the things that happened that went wrong, but I remember that day as mostly good because I knew that God knew this was my birthday, and I kept seeing ways that He loved me.
But something else I’ve learned about towers is that, if you want it to stand, something has to be going through all the levels of it, connecting it together.
In skyscrapers steel beams connect the floors together, and sometimes they even allow the building to sway and bend but not crumble and fall.
So maybe your foundation is pretty solid. But what about the blocks you’ve stacked on top of it? Things you can survive without because you have God, but which you’d rather not have to do without?
Maybe it’s a hobby. Maybe it’s a habit. But if what runs through your tower stops on the second or third floor, the remaining blocks are pretty unstable.
Over the past three months I’ve been writing about a character named Sigmund, who’s living in Nazi Germany during WWII. I didn’t start off knowing much about him, except that he carried a lot of pain, but as I got to know my character I found out he was struggling with his belief.
He’d lost some people, and he wasn’t sure why God would allow this to happen. And while Sigmund’s still calling the shots and I’m still being surprised over half-way through with the second book, I have come to find that sometimes our towers can fall even if we have a good foundation. Because it’s not just a ‘here, I built a tower and God’s in it’ situation.
We have to keep remembering to keep God at the foundation, and to thread His truth through our structure of everyday life. Our towers need to become God’s towers, and we need to keep choosing to let Him be our firm foundation. Because if not, our towers will inevitably fall on us. And maybe if there’s a block in our towers that doesn’t echo God or the Truth, we need to replace it. Because as hard as it is to take a block out of a tower, if it’s in the wrong place it will be for our good to fix that.
Until next time, Ad Lucem.
-L.E. Levens
Aw, this is such a wonderful reminder. <3
This was a beautiful post, Lauren 💗 Thank you.
Awesome insight. I really enjoyed reading this.