What remains is greater than what is destroyed

When I was a kid my family would often indulge my desire to one day preach the Bible by sitting through my sermons. Sometimes I would even put in the effort to "build" a make shift church and invite everyone who lived on our rural gravel road to attend. Yes I was a strange kid.

On one particular occasion I gathered up every lawn chair and tree log I could find and put them in nice neat little rows on my grandmother's front porch. My grandmother was especially supportive of my efforts, and welded a special kind of influence upon the rest of the family when it came to matters of religion. A psychologist might call it guilt. So she would see to it that the inhabitants of our community we affectionately referenced as "Loydville" would be there for my church service. Like any good pastor I enlisted some of my friends to help with the construction of this neighborhood church. We worked all afternoon in the heat of the Mississippi Delta to insure that those attending the service that evening would be as comfortable and receptive as possible. Finally everything was in place, and I returned home to change into my "church clothes", excited that everyone was coming to hear the Word proclaimed.


Upon my return I was horrified to discover that one of the neighborhood kids had destroyed in a matter of minutes what we had worked so hard to build. Undaunted, I went to work immediately in an effort to restore what had been torn down. Thankfully I had the church put back together just as my grandmother, mom, and other relatives began to arrive. I proclaimed the gospel message, my family was encouraging, it was a good day. It is a wonderful memory.

The temptation in our lives even today is to be discouraged when our efforts are plundered and sometimes destroyed by the harshness of this life and the difficulty of relationships. What we work so hard to build can be torn down in a matter of minutes. But the lesson of that summer day long ago is this; what was important wasn't what was destroyed and torn down, but the important things were what remained. Faith, family, friends. What remains is greater than what was destroyed.

"Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing."

-Ephesians 2:7-10 MSG