Daily Word of Grace # 152 (October 14, 2020)
On a crisp fall day when I was in fifth grade a couple friends of mine and I made plans to build a fort in the woods in our neighborhood. We dragged pieces of plywood along with remnants of shingles and carpet from the scrap pile of a local construction site, procured lots of nails from our dads’ tool boxes, and went to work. By the end of the week we had constructed our fort, complete with shingled roof, carpeted dirt floor, and holes cut in the walls for windows. There was one hazard though—the nails we used for the shingles protruded through the roof, so we made a rule that you had to wear a football helmet in our fort to avoid impaling your head (safety first). A couple weeks later there was a particularly violent storm that levelled our fort, which made us sad for a moment but we had already moved on to building bike ramps so we got over it. At the end of his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares those who hear and obey his words to those who build their house, or fort, on a rock, and compares those who ignore his words to being like those who build on sand. Each builder experienced a violent storm, but only the house on the foundation of rock withstood it (Matthew 7:24-27). Each of us will undergo many storms in our lives, but the foundation of Jesus Christ, “the Rock of our salvation” (Psalm 89:26) will always see us through, no football helmet required.
Love and Prayers,
Dave