What Are You Building With?

"What Are You Building With?"
1 Corinthians 3:10-15


I worked construction for a couple of summers while in college to earn money for school.  It sounds more impressive than it was.  The first summer I had one job.  I pulled nails out of boards.  I was a member of the Hod Carriers and Laborer's Union.  I didn't carry any hod that summer.  (Look it up if you aren't sure what hod is.)  But I did a lot of labor.  Boring, tedious labor.  What else can pulling nails out of boards be?

The carpenters would walk by and say things like, "How's it going college boy?"  "Are you getting yourself an education, college boy?"  That became my nickname.  I'm not sure what the crew was working on.  The job site was at the Northgate Mall in north Seattle.  I worked outside in a little fenced in area with my clawed hammer.  Someone would come out and dump another load of bent nail loaded studs and other assorted lumber for the college boy to work on.

I was making pretty good money:  $10.85 and hour.  Which was a lot of money back then.  Until I had to pay my union dues.  That truly was an education, working with the Labor Union.

When I went back to school in the Fall, my friends asked me the obligatory question:  what did you do over the summer?
I'd answer, "I worked construction."
"Far out," they replied.  (For those of you old enough to remember, "Far out" was what we said back then.  It was the "cool" of today.  I've been trying to bring back one of the other replies we used back then:  "Keen."  Or, "Super Keen."  But I haven't had much luck with that.

Anyway, when I told my friends I worked construction, they'd reply, "Far out."  Then they'd ask if I was building houses, or getting up on the girders, 20 stories straight up, welding rivets or some such thing.
I'd reply, "Uh, yeah; No.  I pulled nails out of old boards all summer.  I'd show them the callouses I worked up on my right, hammer-holding hand, and they'd just say, "Far out," and walk away.  I think they thought that "working construction" always involved building some nice structure like a home or a skyscraper.

But just as often as not, it also involves deconstruction, first.  You have to take out something that was there, before you can refill the space with something new.  That involved, in my case, pulling nails from old boards.  It was some OSHA rule about minimizing hazards and the probability of injury at the workplace.  So they paid the college boy $10 an hour to make sure that happened.

I quickly realized there was this disconnect between my college friends and the guys I was getting to know on the construction site.  My friends in college had no idea what it took to build something.  To make it right.  To make it sparkle.  Even to make it useful.  They'd walk into a store in the mall and have no idea what it took to rip out the old store that was there, and start over to make something entirely new.  It seemed to me that that would be an important thing for a Christian to know.  All my friends saw was the finished product—the new store.  They didn't see what had to happen, to make it so, including removing hazards like nails in boards.

Paul saw the truth in construction.  How that was an apt metaphor for the Christian life with some people.  With the Corinthians, especially.  Sometimes you have to start over.  Rip everything back down to the foundation of a person, and replace what was there with something new.  What Paul saw, with the Corinthians, it wasn't the construction that was the hard part.  It was the deconstruction.  It was the tearing down.  It was taking a life apart, stick by stick, but having to do so under great resistance.

You look down the road and you see the deconstruction crew coming.  They are big burly guys.  Shoulders like mountains; arms like oak trees.  Long sleeve shirts.  Hard hats.  Tool belts where menacing looking tools hang and clatter together.  And smiles on their faces.  You say to the Lord, "I thought you said we were going to build something new in my life.  What are they doing coming this way?  Tell them to back off."
And the Lord replies, "We gotta take some things out before we build again.  Sorry, but this is going to hurt a little.  But don't worry; these guys know what they're doing."

Would you let them?  Let them do their work?  Let them take you back down to your foundation?


The next summer I was moved to a hospital where we were tearing out the ceiling so the Duct Worker's Union could put in air conditioning.  I had a particular gift that was suited to this job.  I was 6'9".  I didn't need a ladder.  I could just walk down the hallways, reach up my pry bar, and pull the sheetrock down.  No taking extra time to get up and down off the ladder like the shorter guys.  I was fairly efficient at getting the job done…but I would pay the price of having 25 years of built up dust and who knows what kind of insulation come rain down upon me.  Then sweep and shovel it all up and wheel barrow it to a shoot at a window that would spill it all into the huge dumpster below.  It, like the summer before, was not a glorious job.  But I was "working construction."   And the carpenters I worked with found out the college boy was actually useful.

I got to know the carpenters and the electricians and the duct workers that summer.  I got to find out what make them tick.  What it was that motivated them.  What they were building their lives upon.

One of the guys I got to know was Mike.  He was the epitome of what you first think of as a construction worker.  He was probably 10 years older than I was.  He was a carpenter.  Skilled.  That guy could probably build anything he put his mind to.  Kind of like Rex.

Mike kept us all entertained.  His day was one of hard work.  He pushed himself.  He didn't want to end the day feeling like he had only given half of himself.  He'd work hard.  He'd go home and enjoy a good meal with his family that he knew he provided.  He'd drink a couple of beers.  Watch TV with his wife.  They'd have sex.  He'd get up in the morning, come to the construction site—usually one of the first—tell us all who were gathered around about what he did with his wife the night before, and start in on another day to do the same routine.  I don't know if half the stuff he told us was true, but his stories all held us in place.

Mike fell off a tall ladder that summer.  Broke his leg really bad.  It was a good thing we were working at a hospital.  We carried him right down to the Emergency Room.  When he was patched up with a big, plaster cast on his leg, it looked like it was going to be a 12 week heal.

I'd visit Mike during my lunch time, while he was still in the hospital.  His wife would show up with their kids.  It was awkward looking her in the face after hearing all the stories Mike told about their sex life.

Something I learned talking with Mike after that accident—he'd have his wife drive him out to the construction site at least every other day—what I learned through Mike was that healing and rebuilding can tear a man down even more than the breaking did.  Healing and rebuilding takes so long—it seems like it goes on forever.

Why, when you've got new construction, everything just buzzes along?  New buildings go up so fast.  But rebuilding and remodeling seems like it takes forever.  Especially when that rebuilding is going on in your life.  When God is doing something new in our lives.

And I believed God was doing something new in Mike's life.  I believed God was stripping Mike down to the foundation.  Mike was trying to rebuild with wood and straw, alcohol and bluster.  God was hoping Mike would build his life with something more substantial.  It took everything Mike had to have the patience to rebuild like God was trying to do.  Mike wanted to be fixed, but he wanted to be fixed now, and in his own way, so he could get back to his life.  God was trying to get Mike to clear some things out, first.  Like all of us need to do when we're being rebuilt.  Let the deconstruction crew do their work.  Then rebuild.

Mike and I had some good conversations.  When it was time for me to go back to school, Mike taunted the college boy.  "You go back to your la-la land, college boy.  This is the real world, not there.  This is where real work is done."
I said, "Yeah, but I gotta build my life on something more.  I don't want to fall from a ladder someday, and almost destroy what I had built my life on.  Or find out what I had built my life on was not enough to hold me up and keep me going.  I gotta have something more permanent than that."

We chatted some more about that.  And I drove away from the construction site, never to return.  I worked in churches the final two summers I was in college, running VBS's and Youth Groups.  I never knew what happened with Mike, and if God had gotten the rebuild project done in his life.  I hope the college boy had a small hand in making that happen.


DON'T USE  (story of contractor who had his supervisor build a house using the best materials.)