A Million Plastic Cups

by Kath

The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down. Prov 14:1

My 7 year old daughter was just talking about building a huge tower out of plastic cups. She wants to know how high you could make it with a million paper cups. Mmm. I wonder. And how much would it cost? I don't know. I could do the maths, but I don't think she wants a real answer, just a relative one. A million features in a lot of her questions at the moment. Just how high could you build a tower with a million plastic cups?

  I remember when she was three and she was constantly building things out of plastic cups or old videos. This was her effort at three, and she was pretty proud of being able to do this all by herself, after watching a teenage friend do it.  It made me think of how we build our homes. Sometimes, it feels like we need a million plastic cups and that we are constantly building and what we're building is constantly in danger of being knocked down or blown over. And the cost can be pretty overwhelming, especially the personal cost, money aside, because let's face it, money just isn't what we use to build our homes with, though it can help with.

We need love and wisdom and patience and humility and grace and truth and we need them all in abundance and we need them to be real and strong and true and to come from Him if they are going to stand. And we need to keep putting them out there, like putting up plastic cups that keep falling down. And we find ourselves so drained and so tired and so lacking in these building blocks.

  Some things that jump out for me is that building has to be intentional, it has to be done against the pull of gravity (or sinfulness) and we need to learn how to do it from others. I guess that's where the online community is very helpful. But we also need in-real-life builders to emulate, those whose cups seem to be staying put, people we can observe making it work. Building can be fun, but I guess we take it all a bit too seriously at times.

We can do it our own way, but we still have to follow the basic principle of building on something solid - no Someone solid. I am reminded that unless He is the builder and we are just His helpers, and unless He is the glue that holds our stack together, it will be shaky at best and eventually come crashing down around our ears - maybe not this year or even next, but eventually it will. Like building your house on the sand, it will happen. The storms DO come and they show us what our stack of cups is really made of and whether we built it on Him and with Him and in Him, or whether something else is down there.

Unless the Lord builds the house, the builder labours in vain.

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