More Than a Foundation

(These are my thoughts over the past couple days.  While they are not worded in the best way, I felt that I needed to share them.)

Ask any builder, and he will tell you that the most important part of a building is its foundation.  However, there are so many different building styles and materials when it comes to the foundation.  When one travels to the plains states, he would see a very unique style.  In that part of the country, every building has a cellar.  The builder digs out the cellar, builds formations inside the hole and pours concrete between the dirt and the formations, creating concrete walls around the perimeter of the cellar.

When the twisters come in the spring and summer, that foundation provides the family with protection from the violent attacks of the storm.  Even if the home is blown away, the foundation remains.

We are called to build foundations for our families.  I'm not just referring to the physical foundations upon which our homes are built, but also the spiritual foundations upon which we need to build our homes.  Many people see the foundation as something that you build one time and forget about, but one must continually inspect and repair his home's spiritual foundation.  He must also keep in mind that the foundation is not just what he builds the rest of his home on, but also the source of protection for his family in the time of storm.  He must make that foundation the only One who can calm the storm.

How Amazing!

As a young child, I took part in a Christmas musical about the nativity from the angel’s perspective.  One of the songs that we sang went, “How amazing; how confusing! How can God the Son become a man?”  At that time, I just took the statements of my parents and Sabbath school leaders regarding the plan of salvation in blind childhood faith.  I never really tried to wrap my head around what it all meant; so, it took me a while to really understand just how amazing it is that Christ died for me.

Romans 5:7,8 reads, “For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die.  But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  Everything that we as a human race do comes after what is known in the economic world as a cost/benefit analysis.  We examine how much we are going to sacrifice and we compare it to how much we are going to gain.  And it is here in Romans that we see God’s cost/benefit analysis, and it boggles our minds.  God says that he is willing to sacrifice everything for a chance to save someone who has made no indication that he is going to accept the gift that he is being offered.  Paul compares this analysis to those that we perform.  He reminds us that we as humans are reluctant to even lay down our life for our heroes, and yet God was willing to die for the yet unrepentant scum.  And, all of this, not because He was going to gain anything, but because He loves us.

In examining this seemingly twisted line of heavenly logic, God has been called by many “crazy,” or “underhanded;” crazy because He seems to have sacrificed everything for nothing, and underhanded because no one would really give up all that for nothing; he must have some other motive, right?  But God is neither crazy nor underhanded.  I have experienced first hand the results of this “illogical” plan and the immense freedom that it brings when we accept it.  While I regret the choices that I have made and the pain that I have caused my Savior, I am more thankful than I could ever express to have been the subject of God’s immense love, a love that even the angels have not experienced, a love that makes everything alright.

So now, eleven years later, I am beginning to better understand just how amazing, just how confusing the plan of salvation really is to us in our limited understanding.  So as we ask ourselves the question: how amazing, how confusing; why would God the Son become a man, we realize that perhaps the only answer we will find for now is: love.