God’s Invitation to Higher Ground – Br. Jamie Nelson
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Br. Jamie Nelson
I need to start with a confession: I’ve been that foolish builder who built his house on sand.
I’m thinking back to a college field trip I went on to a Central Oregon ranch. The timing of the trip was dictated by convenience for the class syllabus rather than by the season, so it was quite early in the spring when we went. My classmates and I decided to pitch our tents in a low-lying meadow next to a beautiful little creek. Waking up at sunrise to the musical sound of the flowing water was sublime. I remember taking it all in as I drank my morning cup of coffee.
However, later that morning, big gray clouds rolled in, and a wall of rain began to fall. And it just kept coming down heavily all day.
I bet you can imagine what our makeshift campsite looked like when we returned late in the afternoon – yep, water everywhere. There were puddles of water in our tents, and the creek was a lot louder and wider than it had been that morning, far too near for comfort. We had no interest in us or our belongings getting swept away in the middle of the night.
And so we worked together to move the tents to higher ground, unstaking the pegs, carrying, restaking, drying the tent floors as best we could. Unfortunately, the higher ground was covered with gravel. We weren’t very comfortable on our rocky mattresses that second night, but at least we were out of reach of the rising creek.
The situation I found myself in would have sounded familiar to the crowds that Jesus taught this story to. The countryside of Galilee contains many canyons with seasonal streams. I imagine that a number of those canyons have sandy flat bottoms that look like an ideal place to build a house, that is, when it’s the dry time of year. But when the rains fell, flash floods could come down the canyon and sweep everything away. No, much better to build on higher, rockier ground, someplace not located in the middle of a floodplain.
This passage from Matthew about wise and foolish builders concludes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. After sharing some well-known teachings, such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Golden Rule, Jesus said to the crowds, “Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” (Matthew 7:24).
In the life of Christian discipleship, discerning where to build is oftentimes an ongoing process that requires attunement to changing conditions. Sometimes a heavy storm provides immediate clarity, but it doesn’t always work that way. Rivers do not usually transform the landscape all at once. Most of the time the water’s movement is much more gradual, meandering over the seasons. Only after many years does it become fully apparent that the river’s channel has shifted.
The same can be true in our spiritual lives. We may discover that a particular way of living, praying, or serving that once brought us closer to God no longer fits where we are now. Rather than simply ascribing such situations to personal failure or foolishness on our part, we can read them as signs that the landscape has changed, that God’s invitation for us is to pull up the stakes and make our way to higher ground. And we don’t have to do it alone. One of the great gifts of Christian community is having other people around to help us notice those invitations, to point the way, and to lend a hand in moving our tents.
The rains may come, the creek may rise, and the landscape will change over time, but Jesus is always there, glad to welcome us to higher ground.