Today I was again reminded of how wise it is to rise for work early in this heat-trapping, moisture rich climate. Although it hasn’t rained more than twice in the last two months, the air feels like New Orleans. There is rarely a comfortable hour. Standing on a bus after the hour of 8AM is like standing on the edge of a crowded indoor pool in the summer time. Trying to keep one’s shirt from sticking to the body seems like as good a game as any. Like most games worth playing, you don’t always win.
Three men and me today. There is a satisfaction in building which is unmatched by other endeavors. At the end of the day there is a new wall, seat, floor, pit, or covered system. Each day’s work is marked like the gouges left in a tree you mean to fall with an axe. Eventually the tree will fall, but until then you have to be content with the leaving of the marks. As I swing the axe I am thinking about the placement of the next strike more than I am thinking about other strikes I’ve made. Those strikes are struck, over.
The pounding of one-meter-long steel posts into the ground with an 8 pound sledge is not entirely satisfying in and of itself. Nor is the spreading of an underlayment of plaster, the setting of a few concrete curbs, or the carving out of earth for the setting of pipes. All of these things will one day make an operational church building, however, and there is satisfaction in that.
So much of what we do has a repetition so familiar to it that we think about it only with a piece of our mind that cannot speak. As I fold cement into water into gravel, turning dust and fine rock into a viscous, liquid stone, I am thinking about nothing. Even the soreness of my shoulders or the strain on my abdomen as I twist, scrape, lift and turn does not occur to me. And in the end it is not dust and fine rock I leave behind, but a facility, a building, a place to gather. A place for Him.
albaniacalling 