Our Toolbox of Methods

There is a new house near our church building. It is a barn house - a house that looks like a barn. I have always wanted a barn house. If I was a handyman and into construction, I might go over there and ask how they built the windows and all other neat construction tips. If something was extremely interesting, I might even want to see the tools they used to build it. Nothing beautiful is ever built without the proper tools, materials, and skill of a laborer.

This leads me to our spirituality. A lot of the time we are doing the same old things with broken down tools which eventually causes our faith to be stagnant or fail. The only things we need to cling to are the essentials. Every other method or tradition can be discarded, but that does not mean that they always should be. They don't build tools like the use to, and the same thing is true in spirituality.

But it is not the tools that a person is judged by. It is the end work. We might share essentials with brothers and sisters in Christ and disagree on near everything else. That is fine. What matters is that we do not stop at the essentials but use the tools available to build a life that is reminiscent of Christ. Is that house even worth looking at the tools for? Are our lives lived in such a way that anyone would ever wonder what makes us this way? Maybe we need a new toolbox, or to just open our dusty toolbox and start building.