Foundations

This was originally written on November 26, 2008 at 4:12 a.m. on Facebook.

When you base your life - your existence - on one thing it becomes the pillar of everything you do. That one thing defines you and what you stand for.

The only way I know how to describe it involves a house...

...and like any house, it's built on a foundation. This foundation holds everything up. The walls, the furniture, the floors, the roof. Everything is built on that foundation - that belief - whatever it may be.

And you can handle rebuilding a wall, or retiling the floors because it's just one small feature of the house, which is otherwise strong and sturdy. So repainting the bathroom is alright, so long as the foundation is strong.

But when the foundation breaks down, what happens to the rest of the house?

When the one thing you hold more sincerely and concretely than anything else in your life fails, you have to re-evaluate everything else. When the one thing you've been depending on while you've been putting in a new stove cracks, the solidity of everything built on it must be questioned as well. No matter how nice the house may look on the outside, if the foundation is ruined that house will eventually crumble.

So everything that was ever based on this Truth has to be questioned. You are standing in the house and now it seems like it could fall over at any moment, maybe from the smallest push in any direction. It's a scary thought: that the one thing you held as a Truth in your life is gone, everything else based on it seems less legitimate.

You look down and you see nothing to hold up the rest of the house and the rest of what you've built, and so you know that at any given moment everything else around you can fall apart too. And it shatters your world to know that foundation has ruined everything, but there's nothing you can do.

Everything around you seems like a lie too.

So whether or not you like it, you have to re-examine and question every detail of the house to find out what else is true and what else is just going to break.

It's not until you break down the house piece by piece that you can start to rebuild it once again, except this time on a new, stronger foundation.

Starting to rebuild is a scary process, and it can seem intimidating. But it's also a fresh start. A new beginning. A new house.