For the past five years vacation for Alice and me means projects at a cabin in Washington’s Olympics. When we moved to Arizona, we thought the housing market was too inflated here and decided not to purchase. We also believed we needed a gathering place for family that we were now far from. Hence the cabin and vacations filled with projects . . . and family.
Projects this summer included enlarging a deck, wiring the garage, rebuilding a tool/gardening shed plus doing the yearly maintenance a place in a somewhat harsh environment requires. While building the foundational structure for the enlarged deck, it struck me that what we’d largely been doing for five years was restoring foundational things so we could then make the more obvious appearance and utility related aspects of the cabin look and function as we desired.
The point? You can never bypass or neglect foundational things. If the foundational aspects of any entity, or life for that matter, are neglected no matter how hard one works to make it look good, it will eventually crumble. This has become so obvious to us in our simple little cabin projects that we now do audits of such things; this summer it was an energy audit. As always, this audit redirected our attention and investment away from the more cosmetic toward the foundational.
Our board has been doing that kind of audit, and as a result, purposefully restoring foundational things: mission, values, priorities, foundational structures. It’s often not an easy process, but if you don’t do it, what you build on top of deteriorating structure is sure to fail. Perhaps this is the season for you and your congregation to do an audit . . . revisit the foundational things? May make all the difference.