May 31, 2013- Jane Wilson

Yesterday, the youngest member of our team, Anna, did a devotion about the Tower of Babel.  In her children’s version, God said he wanted there to be many kinds of people in the world, working together to make His kingdom on Earth a better place.

During the day, we mixed a lot of cement in order to add a porch floor to the preschool building.  In the yard, there were piles of gravel, sand, bags of cement, lengths of rebar and a puddle of ground water that had been diverted from a stream flowing across the dirt road – none of which by themselves would make a particularly strong or lasting floor for the porch.  As a team, we and our new Dominican friends shoveled the ingredients into a pile, added the water, and turned it over and over until the consistency was exactly right.

The cement mixing made me think about sometimes getting the perfect end product not always easy.  Sometimes it means taking many different ingredients that don’t seem like obvious choices but in the end are exactly right in combination with each other.  Sometimes you make a batch and realize it isn’t working and you have to start over, remixing until you get it right.

None of us is enough in and of ourselves – we must work together – and sometimes work really HARD together – to get the right mix that results in the perfect end product.  I think this is what Anna’s devotion was trying to get us to consider.  God wants us to work together, to resolve our differences and magnify our similarities in such a way that our world is a better place.  It’s not always easy, but a strong final product makes all the hard work so worthwhile.