Spaghetti Bridges

I'm not going to lie, I got really excited when DJ talked a little about engineering in this chapter. :) The picture (yay visuals! - PS thanks for the drawing a few posts ago Katie) of Jesus as the master bridge builder is such a beautiful revelation of what He came to do.

The first thing that came to my mind when I thought about how often we try to build our own bridges to God is a simple engineering project that I've heard about at Poly. The professor posses this problem to the students: you have a package of spaghetti noodles and scotch tape and you need to build the longest bridge off of the desk that you possibly can. Now, I picture us...building bridges in this life with spaghetti noodles. And I think even if you're not an engineer it's pretty obvious that those bridges (especially when you're only building from one side) won't last very long. For one of two reasons: 1. it won't even make it to the other side before we start walking on it or 2. come on, it's made of spaghetti noodles! But so often we try to bridge the gap, we try to perform, we try to plan our next steps, we try to do life on our own and all we're doing is building a spaghetti bridge.

And even if we had something to build with that was more sustainable than spaghetti, the gap that we are trying to bridge is an eternal separation. I don't know about you guys, but building a bridge that is infinitely long would be exhausting. And that's what we do! All the time! We build our own bridge.

And every now and then our bridge falls, the spaghetti noodles break and we start falling with it, but what happens? We land on another bridge that was underneath us the whole time - it's structurally sound and stretching all the way across the eternal canyon. We see His arms outstretched, a crown of thorns on His head, His body beaten - He is the bridge and the bridge is FINISHED! It's already built, we just didn't see it because we were too busy trying to build our own. He is the master bridge builder. He built it from both sides of the gap - the only way it would have ever been completed. Why waste time and energy on our own bridges, when the one we want to be on is already built and is way better than one we could  ever build on our own?! What needs to be done has already been done!


One other thought..."Sit, My Son, My only begotten Son whom I have loved for all eternity" (128). As much as I read this as a beckon to Jesus to sit with the Father, I also read it like this "Sit, my Daughter, my beloved little girl whom I have loved for eternity." A call to come and sit with the Father. To sit. And be. Just be.