and -this- little piggy...

"... Jesus himself told a story about the foundational importance of his teaching. It is about the construction trade, a business with which Jesus was intimately familiar, having taken over his dad's job as an independent contractor. It involves two men who build houses, but one builds on sand and the other on rock.

There is something universal about this story that causes it to keep popping up in various forms. A humble version of it is one of the best-known stories in American literature. Its basic elements:
- The primary characters are the builders - they each construct a house.
- Not all houses are created equal; there is a contrast between wise building and foolish building.
- Each house faces a test. If the house was built wisely, it stands; if it was built foolishly, it falls.
Sound familiar? It's the story of the three little pigs.

We are all house-builders, constructors of our lives. Every commitment we make, every friendship we enter, every skill we cultivate or neglect, every promise we honor or break, becomes a part of our house. The quality of the choices we make will determine the quality of our characters, our souls.

We are each responsible for our own house. No one else's. But we have a hard time with this. We try to find someone else to make responsible for it. The wire services carried the story a few years ago of a man who was arrested for bigamy. In fact, he had 105 wives. When the authorities asked him how this had happened, he replied that he had received bad legal advice...

This truth is so large that we may spend our whole lives evading it... many people refuse to truly make and own deep choices because they want to avoid the responsibility and anxiety that inevitably accompany human freedom. We see this in extreme form in cults and communes. Authoritarian churches often flourish because many of us want someone to relieve us of the pressure of having to choose.

But often our attempts to evade responsibility are more subtle. A young woman chooses where she will go to school, what career she will enter, who she might date and marry all based on what she thinks her parents would want her to do. She never truly questions the beliefs, values or religious convictions that her life is arranged around. Ironically, she doesn't even guess that her parents are much less certain of these things than she has always pictured... If asked, she would be adamant that she 'is her own person'. But the truth is she has abdicated her personhood. She is not building her own house. She is building someone else's. But she will have to live in it all the same.

Paul Tournier wrote, 'To live is to choose. It is through the making of successive and resolute choices that man traces out his life.' Some people are so afraid of being disappointed by their choice that they avoid making choices at all. Or they may fear disappointment so they procrastinate. But then, that is the house they live in.

We are all house-builders. There is no alternative. We are constructing our lives."

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Some food for thought, adapted from Love Beyond Reason by John Ortberg, referred to by Lynne.

And this little piggy shall dwell in the house of the Lord to see his salvation, and many good days...