A Firm Foundation

In many ways it made perfect sense to us.  We had a goal, and so we formed a plan.  However, the dreams of the young are often bigger than their brains.

At the age of ten, I was far away from being able to reach the basketball hoop in our driveway.  No matter how hard I tried, or how much I reached, I couldn't even come close to touching the net.  My fifteen year old brother could brush the net with his fingers, but couldn't reach the rim.  Fueled by the same dream of dunking the basketball, we set into motion the perfect plan, one my parents were not home at the time to evaluate.

We had a small trampoline, maybe only five feet wide.  We pulled it out from the garage and placed it next to the hoop, but it wasn't quite enough to reach the heights we were looking for.  So we looked around for something else.  What we found were blocks of wood of varying sizes.  We brought them to the driveway and built a base to put the trampoline on, and then lifted the trampoline onto our structure.  We knew this would work; it should give us the height we needed to be able to jump and dunk the basketball, just like Michael Jordan.  It was going to be awesome.

My brother went first.  He stepped back, and got a good running start toward the hoop.  He leapt into the air, landing his feet on the trampoline.

I was so excited.  This was going to be epic.

It wasn't.

The moment my brother's foot hit the trampoline, we got a lesson in physics and architectural design.  The entire structure we had carefully built crumbled like it was built from toothpicks.  My brother flew through the air, coming down hard on his wrist, fracturing it.  I ran to a neighbor's house, and she took him to the hospital.  I then put the trampoline and blocks back in their proper place, and it wasn't until several years later (after the statute of limitations had passed) that my parents found out the truth of what happened.

We had a dream.  A great hope.  Was it a bad dream?  No, not at all.  It is, in fact, quite common for children of that age to want to do such things.  The problem came in the execution.  We put our hopes onto something unstable.  Even though we did not see the flaws at the time, before the jump, those flaws caused the plan to fail.

We see the same thing in life all the time, but instead of broken wrists, the consequences can include financial hardships and broken marriages.  The world is full of people who are living their life on unstable ground, unaware that they are moments away from everything crumbling around them.  These are people who are living generally "good" lives in our eyes, but they're missing the one thing that makes everything else work: Jesus.

This isn't about religion.  This isn't about following the rules and merely making yourself feel like your life is stable.  This is about the true God that created you, loves you, and wants the best for you.  God isn't a figment of man's imagination.  He's no work of fiction.  He is just as real as you and me, and He is the only foundation that is worth standing on. 

We live in a world where nothing is ever good enough.  We complain about the good times because we still don't have it as good as the guy across the street.  When the bad times come, we complain even louder, angrily cursing the universe for being unfair.  We wonder what we did to deserve such treatment.  When life is rough, we fall back on our own strength, or the strength of our friends and family.  When that fails (as it often does), what do we look to then for strength?  There are a million options the world has to offer for how to make yourself feel better and how to put your life back together.  They may work on the surface, or for a period of time, but only one thing is strong enough to stand on for all the years of your life.

God is the beginning and the end, the great creator, the one who holds all the secrets of the universe in His hands.  He will not allow to you fall apart.  He will never crumble beneath you, and He will never forsake you.  God will work miracles in your mind when you surrender your life to Him.  When you give God your life, saying that you will rely on Him instead of this world, He will become everything you ever needed.  The way you see things will start to align with how God sees them. 

We must bring everything to God: the good and the bad, the joyous and the shameful.  He loves us no matter what, and we can live knowing that everything we place at His feet is sitting on a firm, unshakeable foundation.  When you place your life on the rock that is Jesus, there is nothing that this world can throw at you that will cause you to fall apart.

The next time you stand back and examine your goals in life, don't simply come up with the quickest, easiest path possible to fulfilling those goals.  Pray that God will be your strength and your foundation, and that His will be done in your life.  Place your goals at His feet and allow them to happen in His timing.