Four weeks ago I started writing about building a foundation, Scripture, the sacraments, prayer, the saints, like it was something I could finish by the end of a month. It isn’t. Hebrews says we’re surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and then it says the thing I keep needing to hear: we run the race set before us looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Founder and perfecter. He laid the foundation, and he’s the one who finishes it. Not me.

That’s actually a relief, if I let it be one. I spent this month rereading Scripture, sitting with confession and the Eucharist, trying to actually pray instead of just meaning to, learning from people who did all of this long before me. None of it made me finished. It just put me back on a foundation I didn’t lay in the first place.

So here’s where I’ll leave it today, not with an answer, just a question I’m sitting with myself. What am I building my life on right now, today, this weekend, and is it something that can actually hold the weight, or is it something I’m just hoping holds until I get around to checking?

Today’s Bible Study

Paul put it plainly to the Corinthians: by the grace given him, he laid a foundation like a skilled builder, and someone else is building on it, but no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. That line opened this whole month for me, back on day one. Reading it again now, at the end, it hasn’t changed, and that’s the point. The foundation isn’t something I upgrade as I grow. It’s the one thing underneath everything else that stays exactly where it was laid.

Recommended Reading

If you want to see what building on that foundation can look like over an entire life, I’d point you to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, his own account of coming into the Church as a young man. It’s long and it wanders in places, but watching someone actually build is worth more than another explanation of how.