Day Seven: By Building Healthy Relationships
This parable is about more than just a house. Often in the Word a person's house means a person's family. "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" (Joshua 24:17). The house is a reminder of the people who live in it and the relationships that they have with each other. On a deeper level our house is our mind where our love for the Lord lives and our love for other people exists. After death, when we enter the spiritual world, we will live in a home that is in a community of people who share our values and care about the same things that we care about. We can imagine that as we are building healthy relationships in this world, we are also creating for ourselves a place in that community where we will live forever. That is, by working on our current relationships we are actually building our eternal homes.
No matter what our gifts are, they will have the greatest impact when we use them to build healthier relationships. A businessman can have a greater impact for good by building healthy relationships with suppliers, employees and customers. A teacher has more effect on students when building healthy relationships is one of the goals of teaching. In almost any job, the quality of the relationships among workers, employers and customers is one of the greatest factors in job satisfaction. More significantly, we can have a truly spiritual impact on others when we serve them from love, according to wisdom. This is what healthy relationships are all about.
When one graduates from high school or college we call it commencement because it is more a beginning than an end. Today is the commencement of this spiritual journey. What we have done in the past six weeks is to lay a foundation Now it is time to start building on that foundation.
In the parable of the house built on the rock, Jesus speaks of the winds and floods that beat upon the house. These are the trials that come when we dedicate ourselves to loving the Lord and other people. The foolish person who built his house on the sand was probably not thinking about storms that would come — we easily recognize how foolish that is. It is much better to be wise and build your house with the expectation that there will be storms, so that it can survive. Yet, how many people go into marriage without the realistic expectation that there will be difficult trials and conflicts? How many people start a new job without thinking that they may have to struggle with their relationships there?
You have a choice: You can ignore all of the things you have learned in this program – it will be just like sand, a lot of words that are blown away or washed out by the flood of experiences and messages that assault your senses every day. The opportunity to use the wisdom in this program in your relationships will, likewise, wash away. Conversely, if you practice the things you have learned these past six weeks, it will become permanent in your memory and your life, and it will provide a strong foundation for building and maintaining healthy relationships.
By working on our current relationships we are actually building our eternal home.