Foundations

Elaine Utting

These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on.
If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who build his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit - but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.
But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.
Matthew 7:24-27 (MSG)

I saw the reality of these words in a more everyday way in my own life recently.

Earlier this year I spent a fair bit of time - and money - on new plants for the pots in our back yard. Pansies, trailing lobelia, and some new ones with long Latin names I can’t pronounce.

A few weeks later I was standing at our back door, admiring my handiwork, which, in a modest way, is all starting to look a bit spectacular.

There’s a total of 32 pots, including two tall eucalyptus trees, three climbers and a beautiful dark red acer. The flowers are colour-themed in blues and purples, different levels, different textures. And it’s still early days - those trailing lobelias haven’t begun to trail yet.

And then I sadly reflected that it would all look so much nicer if the yard was paved in some nice slabs or bricks instead of tarmac.

I remembered, as I do each year, that I hadn’t paid attention to the foundations of my work before I started.

When we moved in we were really busy with commissions and keeping galleries supplied. We’d bought the house because it was a low price, clean and functional, near to a convenience store, and had lots of space for us to work in. It had been cheaply renovated to put on the market. When it didn’t sell, perhaps the owners thought the old cracked cement floor in the back yard, a lovely golden colour as I remember, which we’d seen in earlier estate agent’s details, was putting people off. So they covered it with tarmac - a quick fix.

I just wanted to get some colour and softness into our rather bleak surroundings. I didn’t look ahead. I did another quick fix, just like the people before us. I bought plants and tubs to start to brighten it up.

And then the unexpected took over - ill health, Covid, more ill health. And all the time there was work for galleries, and old and new customers to consider. It was too time-consuming - and expensive as well - to think of making a radical change to the surface of the yard. So I just kept doing the same thing, buying a few more plants, building on a foundation that wasn’t quite right.

I was making ‘homeowner improvements’ instead of digging deep and starting with a sound foundation.

For me it’s a regular reminder to ‘work (Jesus’s) words into my life’ so that my life - if not my back yard - is built on The Rock.