Foundings Desert diary from Tuesday, November 25, 2003 I’ve heard sermons all my life about how important it is to build a firm foundation for your life, house, kids, marriage, spiritual well-being, dog-house etc, but I’ve never put as much thought into it as I have in the past few months. Scraping, clawing, cutting and digging the footing for a building has got to be the hardest part of the whole thing. Even with some heavy machinery available, you still have to use a lot of back breaking work to shovel, and wheel dirt into the right spots at a tediously slow pace. I think my eyes have begun to glow blue as in Dune from the constant exposure to the dust. It was coming out of my pours at the end of it. And the pictures we have up on the site don’t tell the story. You can look at the progress being made from frame to frame and see the whole transformation in a matter of minutes. It’s like watching a 700 Club testimony of how God took a drug addict and fixed their life in 10 minutes before the commercial break. No, neither this foundation work nor the drug addicts rebirth took place in a day and media will never be able to do it justice. Maybe there are lessons in this life that just can’t be conveyed without living them. I feel an immense sense of accomplishment. If it wasn’t so hard, it wouldn’t be so good of a feeling. Is there something about a foundation that has to be hard? Would it have been cheating to have paid someone to have built it for us? Maybe. It might not have truly felt like our building if we had hired it out. By building it ourselves from the ground up, it’s almost a right of passage. A “We’ve carved out our own dwelling in the wilderness” type of feel. God blessed us on several occasions in the process. He brought us an electrician and friend who lent us a front loader free of charge. This allowed us to bring enormous amounts of dirt up to the building site in a matter of hours rather than weeks. He also granted us a wonderfully measured, constant rain the evening that we finished leveling the inner portion of dirt in our form. We had just finished making sure the entire pad was exactly the right height. The rain packed it about as hard as rock. One day earlier and we’d have had to chip through that rock to distribute it around correctly. God’s timing was perfect, and we were glad that we hadn’t given in to the temptation to put that day’s work off until tomorrow. The day that we were putting down the plastic, the winds began to pick up, but they held off until we finished getting the wire mess in place. The next day it was horribly windy, but everything was held in place by the wire mesh and some 2”x4” lumber we put on the form. The day we poured the concrete, the winds let up until we were done. They picked up and were horrible again that afternoon, but the cement was already set. Again, God gave us perfect timing. Perhaps this similar to building our spiritual foundations. God doesn’t remove any of the hard, tedious work, but he does bless you in the midst of the building. Brother Greg