When The Foundation Cracks

Our visit to Ground Zero was a very moving experience. Seeing this 20 acre scar in the ground and reliving the pictures from TV in your mind as you stand there is incredible. One of the oddities of Ground Zero today is the building that is dark on the left of the picture. This is the Duetch Bank Building. It survived the carnage of September 11. Like most of the buildings that surrounded the Plaza, all the windows in the building were blown out. But the building survived. At least, it is still standing. Survival might be too strong a word.
It seems that the upper floors of the building survived without any significant damage. However, the lower floors were damaged significantly by the towers falling and the intense heat of the fires that raged on following the collapse. While the upper floors can still be used, the lower floors cannot. And, of course, when your foundation is cracked, the building is not safe. The reason the building is wrapped with black material is that real point of the story. You see, one of the major pieces of transportation in NYC is the subway system. The World Trade Center actually had two stops underneath the buildings. It took months and months to get the subway system up and running from Uptown to Downtown. It was a vital link in the way people get around in a city that has millions of people trying to get around a very small island. The picture at the right is the subway exit at the observation area for Ground Zero. You can see how many people line the streets (and if you can see well, the streets are full of cars). The problem for the Bank Building is that if you implode it, the subway underneath will be damaged and you will have the same issues as you did when the Twin Towers came down. So, what do you do?
Well, the demolition artists are not going to destroy the building and bring it down in a heap. Instead, they are dismantling the building piece by piece. Starting with the top floors (the undamaged, stable floors) they are carefully taking down the whole building. It will take them months and months to do it. But it will save the city untold problems in the long run. Imagine, dismantling a perfectly good top half of a building just because the bottom floors are fragile and the subway goes underneath!
Too many people (including many who go to church) are living lives built like the Duetch Bank Building. It's not just that their foundations are cracked, it's that they have built successful lives on cracked foundations. To look at the their lives, they look to be healthy from all appearances. But down below, in the heart and soul, the building is unsteady and will, eventually, have to come down. The danger lies in how it comes down. When someone turns their lives completely over to Jesus Christ (not just the upper floors but the whole building) God will tear down the old structure and rebuild it on a lasting foundation. Often, he is able to preserve the good parts of your life and place them back into your new life. Not all is lost when the Grace of God recreates your soul. However, if you allow your life to come crashing down it will not be just your life that will come down but all those others who pass underneath your life, like the subway under the Duetch Bank Building, that will be affected by your fall. Your life affects so many other lives. How you live it makes all the difference. And how you build - and who builds it - will determine whether it will last or crash down on your family, job, friends, and church. Jesus said in Matthew 6:47-49:
I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete."