The Woodpile

1 Peter 2:1-10

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander
• like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk
• you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house
• once you were not a people, but now you are God's people

Applying the Word to My Life:
We picked up a trailer load of lumber to build a chicken coop with my boys - two-by-fours, plywood, a few rolls of wire, a box of screws, some metal roofing. Piled in the yard, none of it was a chicken coop. It was just materials taking up space, waiting.

It took the better part of a week of actual measuring, cutting, and fastening before it became something a chicken would actually live in. Nothing in that pile did its job by just being near the other pieces. It had to be built - fitted, nailed, screwed into place - before it was anything at all.

Peter uses almost the same image for the Church. He calls believers living stones, each one coming to Christ on their own, then built together - not stacked, built - into a spiritual house. A pile of stones isn't a temple any more than a trailer of lumber is a coop. It takes actual work, over actual time, before separate pieces become one thing that can hold something living.

Before he gets to the building image, Peter tells his readers to put away malice, deceit, envy, and slander, and to crave pure spiritual milk the way a newborn does, so they can grow up into salvation. That's not a separate point from the building - it's the same one. You can't fit two pieces of lumber together if one of them is warped. Malice and envy do to people what a warp does to a two-by-four - they don't just sit there uselessly, they actively keep the pieces from joining.

You don't get to skip the fitting-together part by just showing up near other believers. Whatever's warped in you - the grudge, the envy, the loose talk about somebody - has to get planed down before you're actually load-bearing for anybody else in that house.

Peter says it plainly: once you were not a people, and now you are. A stack of individuals isn't a people any more than a stack of lumber is a coop. Something has to actually get built before that changes - the same as it did in our yard, board by board, until what used to be a pile of lumber started keeping chickens warm.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll name one grudge or warped edge in myself and start smoothing it out instead of carrying it forward.