FOUNDATIONS
"How is the filter on your air conditioning unit?" he would ask long distance. Filter on my air conditioning? I ran to see what this creature might be.
You mean that furry thing under the unit?" I asked him, running back to pick up the phone.
He groaned. "That's dust, Ginny, and your unit will burn out if you don't change it quick."
I made my way to the hardware store. Size? They come in different shapes? It seems they did. I guessed at the size, missed it by six inches and just folded up the excess and secured it with electrical tape. It worked fine.
"Dad!" I frantically inquired another time. "How do I turn off the water? It's pouring by the bucketfuls into my bedroom!" Then a few days later: "How do I change the bulb in the refrigerator?" Still later: "How do I replace a fuse?"
Dad led me through the birth pangs of caretaker to an old house. Discipled in the Great Depression he wholeheartedly subscribed to the belief, "God helps those who help themselves: and kept me supplied with hammer, screw drivers, and encouragement.
My last child at home had left for college and when Dad died I felt I was on my own for the first time in my life. Alone in the house I was an unwilling audience to taunting echoes of that which I had lost, some of which I was forced to acknowledge had in fact never existed. One solitary pre-dawn I reflected upon this scripture from the King James Version of the Bible:
Tossed with tempest and not comforted,
Behold I will lay thy stones with fair colors
And lay thy foundations with sapphires."
Isa. 54:11
And I remembered about foundations. My dad built
several buildings and I watched him pour foundations. It seemed they took more
planning and work than erecting the structure. The ground on which the
foundation will rest has first to be surveyed using the inflexible lodestar of
heavenly bodies and the pure truths of trigonometry and geometry.
Sometimes
borings must be taken 50 or more feet down to determine upon what substance the
foundation will rest. Is it a former excavation filled in with rubble and
garbage or it is limestone-bearing rock? If it's the latter, everyone says,
"Beautiful!" and confident construction of the foundation could
begin.
The
God of beauty and geology uses sapphire to fashion our foundations when we come
to him with unclean hearts full of worthless debris. One of the hardest substances
known to man will be laid into the bedrock of our lives. Its rich colors will
flash with deep royal blues and violets grounding our feet, stone-steady. When
the aurora borealis dance across the northern heavens it will sparkle
and shimmer.
Then
may come a time when out of the south, red-hot comets streak through our lives
and burn their way down to the depths of our Rock and we cry out, "Why
have you forsaken me, God?"
And over the fury of the elements come a sound
like no other. The very Spirit of God rushes from His secret place to our
defense. It is then that we find He has made His holy dwelling place within the
very jeweled foundation that He set within the vacuum left by the garbage and
rubble that we surrendered to him.