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Moving Bricks
This place transformed the way I view my life. Let me tell you about Meteora, Greece.
Ephesians 4
It was the most otherworldly place I’ve ever been and at the same time, it transformed the way I view my life in this world. So my wife has family in Greece, and we’ve been there a few times to visit them. And everybody, when they talk about Greece, they usually talk about the islands. But this place that we went to was in Central Greece. It’s called Meteora. So like meteor with an A on the end. And it’s this area, you go through this low space in Greece and then you get to the base where there’s these mountains and on the top, or all of these monasteries that were built oh so long ago. And they’re amazing for many reasons. The landscape is beautiful, the buildings are beautiful, but also because they’re on these mountains, they preserved all this history and this literature. But then maybe the thing that really stuck with me the most was the fact that in order to get up there initially, they needed to rock climb to get to the top. And for some of the monasteries took 70 years just to get the building materials to the top of these mountains in order to build these buildings.
And that’s stuck with me because I thought, wow, for the people working on getting these bricks to the top, many of them worked on a project that they would never see completed. They hauled bricks, but they wouldn’t see it finished. They wouldn’t see it done. And I just thought, wow, like, what kind of headspace do you need to be in to work on a project where you don’t necessarily see it finish? And I had a hard time imagining that. But I’ve realized recently, and this is what has transformed something in my life, that I actually it’s not that hard for me to imagine it because we are in that same situation as the church. In Ephesians 4 it talks about how we use our gifts for the building up of the church.
And sometimes what’s really difficult for us is when we look at the work we’re doing and we’re not seeing a big, clear, necessarily finished product. Maybe we’ve been hard at work trying to serve or to minister or to work on sharing Jesus in our communities, and we’re not seeing this big deal finished product. It feels like we’re just moving a brick after a brick after brick for a whole lives. And we may even wonder, like, is this all I’m ever going to see is just this small, this small progress?
As I think about that for myself, I realized that part of the reason why I struggle with that is that I have this tendency to make what I’m working on about me. I want to see how it works. I want a building that can be done, work that can be done in my lifetime. And my guess is that’s part of why you struggle with it, too. And I guess that because our nature as sinful people is that we want the building to be about us. We always have. That’s how it started in the garden. Adam and Eve wanted to do what looked good in their own eyes, what they could see. And if we were left to ourselves, all we would ever have is a world that we can create, which isn’t very much. We would be separated from our God and left to die.
But Jesus, Jesus laid down his life, died on a cross for your sin and mine. And he rose again to set us right with God. You are forgiven. You are right with God. And now you are free to be part of something bigger than yourself. You know those those men, if they wouldn’t have been willing to carry those bricks to the top, those buildings would have never been built. And I’m not saying that God needs you or me to do anything. He doesn’t. God is God, but he does want us to be part of the work he’s doing in this world. You get to be part of it. You get to use your gifts and serve others. Share the message and you may not see it built in your lifetime, but there will be a day that you stand with Christ and you see, and he points out, and he says, look at this beautiful thing that you got to be a part of.
Whenever we forget that, we can look back to the cross and we can be reminded that we are forgiven, that Jesus has died, that he has risen again. And then we get to step forward and embrace whatever he has for us. So climb that mountain, move that brick and see what the Lord will do through you.
