If you work the words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who dug deep and laid the foundation of his house on bedrock. When the river burst its banks and crashed against the house, nothing could shake it; it was built to last. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a dumb carpenter who built a house but skipped the foundation. When the swollen river came crashing in, it collapsed like a house of cards. It was a total loss.

I was reading this the other night while rocking bella back to sleep at 3ish a.m.  Reading the Bible after adding a child to your family just reframes stuff, and I am having to process more than consume scripture and it is awesome.  I’ve had a couple days to process this passage. Read the new take-aways I had after the break:

• I can’t build the foundation for Bella right now.
• We start off building without a plan due to the fact that we’re babies and we don’t plan very much when we’re that young.
• At some point, we hear the words of God, the words of Jesus, and we have the opportunity to work the words into our lives or use them to provide accents in our lives.
• We either WORK these words or USE these words.
• I think the updated parable is like this: Ty Pennington shows up to give your house an extreme makeover.  This show is smart in this way: they don’t give your house a makeover, they give you a new house.  What if your house was built without a foundation, or there is a crack in your foundation, or the foundation is built out of floam.  Then Ty and his crew show up and knock out some walls and add some skylights and some paint.  Your foundation still sucks.  It’s like once we hear these words, we can use them to put some paint on, or we can recognize our previous inability to plan, and scrap the whole thing, everything we have known, and start over, basing everything on the truth.  (btw, if you’ve searched for truth in a million places, you might not have found it simply because you didn’t realize that truth isn’t a thing to find, it’s a person, and his name is Jesus.  just saying.)
• Then there is the river.  In either scenario, the river comes.  This aligns perfectly with my motto when I was in high school, ‘Life Sucks.’  It says ‘When the river burst its banks and crashed against the house’ not ‘If the river burst…’
• So when this happens, if we look around and can say “It was a total loss” then I guess we know where we stood on the whole foundation/work/use situation.  I just don’t want to get to that point to make the decision about the foundation.
• Starting over takes work, but it is the only thing that makes sense when we find the Truth and throw our selves on the mercy of God.