Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

My oldest son and I have been doing a lot of Lego building this last week or so. He built a corvette, a dragon, and some other bits, too. I’ve been slogging away on building Barad-dur (the tower with the eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings).

The Barad-dur set is 5,471 pieces and will stand 33” tall when completed. My eyes are not quite what they used to be so assembling this has taken a bit more assistance than I’ve needed in the past. Reading glasses and good solid lighting are a must!

But the thing I’ve been reflecting on is how a small miscalculation at an early point can have ramifications far down the line. I’ll suddenly discover that a wall doesn’t line up with another or that a piece that should be one place has seemingly disappeared because it was used elsewhere.

So I end up digging and excavating trying to figure out where that mistake happened and how I might fix it. Our relationships and spiritual life are often the same. We find that something isn’t lining up. We realize that what seemed firm is not holding up. Or we see that what we thought we were building isn’t quite coming together as we imagined.

So it takes some work. It takes exploration. It takes time to go back a little way—or maybe even deeper—to find where things went askew. We may need to look closely or we may find the answer quickly. But to build right going forward sometimes takes looking back.

That’s the opportunity afforded by different aspects of the life of the Church. Making a confession for example or taking seriously Communion and our relationships with Christ and one another. We can take the time it takes to look at our past and shape our future. We can do a bit of taking some things apart to see more clearly what we might yet build.

God’s instructions in our life are generally pretty simple yet rarely easy. Sometimes we lose our place in the book and get off track. Thank God for a grace and mercy that always invites us to rebuild even when we think we’ve well and truly messed up.

May you find time to build in the days ahead. Or may you find the space to look back at steps past and see what might yet be built.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert