Monday, July 19, 2010

Cornerstone

I've been thinking about this whole concept of Jesus as our cornerstone for quite some time now. It stems from my earlier thoughts on the Pursuit of Rightness. If Jesus is the cornerstone of the Christian faith, will all our "houses" look the same? If Jesus is the cornerstone, the rock, the foundation...if everything boils down to Him, will every person's faith look the same? Will all of our beliefs, biblical interpretations, practices, convictions, and so on be clones? I don't think so.

And I think that is the beauty of the Christian faith...diversity. In my own life I have built up, torn down, and started reconstructing the framework of my belief system. The house is still in the process of being built. I don't know if it will ever be complete. I'm sure there will be plenty of remodeling and possibly more demolition in the future. I used to hold firm to every little detail...from the structure, to the paint color, to the moldings, down to the placement of the furniture...nothing could change. Now I hold firm to the what started it all...the cornerstone...Jesus. I may like the way my house is looking and prefer things a certain way, but I am also willing to let those things change with time.

An event that really triggered this thought process for me was the passing of my Grandpa. As I was staring out the passenger window at the stars over eastern Washington on our trip back to Minnesota, I was thinking about my Grandpa. I was thinking about how much he loved Jesus. I was thinking about how different our houses looked, yet we had the same cornerstone. I could get so frustrated with my Grandpa because he viewed things so differently than me. I could never understand why he was so stubborn. As I sat there that night in the car with tears in my eyes, God taught me a valuable lesson...our houses may have looked different, but our cornerstone was the same.

No comments:

Post a Comment