Hammer Time

As a part of my job, i get the wonderful opportunity to do some amazing things. One of them is occasionally I get to spend all day operating a compressed air jack hammer. I know, I know, you are all thinking, "you lucky dog you.", but it is not quite as glamorous as it may sound. Sure, on the back ache and pain reliever commercials it looks great, but you can't believe everything you see on T.V. It really is quite tasking. Despite its apparent technical difficulty, when you spend as much time as I do operating one, it takes very little mental capacity to bust concrete into small pieces. As a result, my mind usually tends to wander. I find myself contemplating life's small mysteries like, "I wonder what is for supper tonight, why do some people say supper and others dinner, chowder is a funny word, if ants could talk would they still call their father's sister Aunt, Is that something shinny, wasn't Jack Nicholson in The Shinning?" you get the idea, not a whole lot going on in the upper room of the Rikel cranium.

Today, however, was different. The concrete I was pulverizing was being replaced because the people who originally poured it, poured it on mud. The most important part of constructing with concrete and almost everything else is a good solid foundation. So, concrete is usually poured on a good base of compacted aggregate. Now I am no engineer, but I learned enough about mud as a kid trying to catch tadpoles in our farm pond to know that something that will squish between your toes is probably not a solid foundation, although it is good for grossing out your older sister.

As i continued to hammer away at the concrete, I was reminded of Jesus talking about the wise man who built his house upon a rock and it stood against the storms and waves, and how the foolish man built his on sand and it came crumbling down. I am sure from the outside, both houses looked pretty much the same, but it was what was underneath that made the difference. i think that is the way we are a lot of times. People can look like they are as solid as concrete on the surface, but that is just a facade. Underneath their foundation is not built upon their relationship with Jesus. It is built on Pride, Materialism, Greed, Selfishness, and when things hit us we begin to crumble. I know there has been times when my foundation has not been made of what it needed to be and God took His jack hammer and pounded away what seemed to be a good surface until he got to my foundation and replaced it with "The Rock" a is in the process of building the man He desires me to be. One set upon the rock. And just like the concrete I will pour onto that solid base tomorrow, I may get run over, beat on, stormed on, but I will not be moved.