When I was 9 my family moved into a new neighborhood. Our house was one of the first on the street and for the next couple years we watched the neighborhood take shape as houses rose from the field across the street. The spring I was 11 or so, the kids on my street did a little building of our own. Robby, an older kid who lived a few houses up, enlisted the help of a bunch of us younger boys to build a tree house in his backyard. A couple days a week, my brother and I would borrow my dad’s hammers and spend some time after school pounding nails.
Once school was out, we were able to work even harder and the house was looking pretty cool — complete with interior carpet and a real shingle roof. But one day in mid-June, a few days before we were to complete our treetop Taj Mahal, our mom got a phone call and promptly hauled us up to Robby’s house. All the other boys were there, along with their moms and the construction foreman for the developer building the homes across the street.
Turns out it’s illegal to steal lumber and shingles from a construction site, even if it does look like it’s in a trash pile. The foreman (who happened to be the developer’s son) gave us one day to dismantle the tree house and return everything we’d taken. We spent the rest of that day carefully prying apart boards and bringing everything back across the street. We spent considerably more time grounded, and I recall that it took more than a few weeks of allowance to pay for the shingles and other materials that we’d ruined.
As I thought about that little incident recently, it reminded me that sometimes we treat the Church’s teachings like scrap lumber. We figure that we can pick and choose what’s good and useful and what’s not and that we can build our own little belief system from whatever we like. It might even look pretty cool when we’re all done.
But just as the lumber for our tree house really belonged to the developer, the Church really belongs to God. He is its architect and designer. And like the developer who put his son in charge of construction, God sent His Son to build the Church from the best He has to offer. And just as construction workers know usable wood from trash; the apostles, bishops, saints, and martyrs through the ages who’ve built our Church with their blood, sweat, and holy lives are real experts when it comes to knowing sound teaching from bad.
And so when I’m tempted to ignore or toss out those teachings I find uncomfortable or inconvenient, and build “the Church of Joe” from what I like, I really have to do some soul searching to see who really knows the Divine Developer best. In those moments I have a choice to make: will I be a builder or a lumber thief? Do I want to live in a home built to last, or in a tree house built with stolen supplies?
How about you? Build something great this summer. God Bless.
