Spiritual Renovations: Yard Sale or Cathedral?

  Dear reader, This morning my morning watch brought me to  1Cor 3:12, 1Pet 1:24-25 Which also got me to thinking about how I build my life, my faith, my understanding. It's like I'm constantly constructing something, but what are my materials?

Sometimes, I catch myself building with grass—those quick, surface-level beliefs I've picked up without really examining them. Like how I used to mirror everything my first youth pastor said, or how I'd adopt the spiritual practices of whoever seemed most impressive at the time. It's easy. Comfortable. But ultimately, it withers.

The wood of my own natural instincts isn't much better. My default ways of thinking, my knee-jerk reactions, my unexamined cultural conditioning—they look solid, but they're ultimately unrefined. They might hold something up for a while, but they're not really transformative.

And stubble? That's those moments when I'm just going through the motions. Doing spiritual things because I think I should, not because I'm genuinely experiencing anything real. It's so fragile that the slightest challenge blows it away.

But what would it mean to build with gold? With silver? With precious stones?

Gold feels like those rare moments of true insight—when I'm not just hearing something, but actually understanding it deep in my core. When my perspective shifts not because someone told me to change, but because I've seen something profound.

Silver seems like those times when I'm actually listening. Not just to others, but to myself. To that deeper voice that knows more than my surface-level thoughts and fears.

And precious stones? That's transformation. That's when the rough edges of my soul get cut and polished. When I'm not just changing my mind, but being changed at the very core of who I am.

I'm realizing how much of my spiritual life has been about mimicking others instead of experiencing my own genuine journey. Like that story about the church leader who was so slow that his entire congregation became slow—I've done that. I've copied spiritual styles, thinking that looking like someone else's faith was the same as having my own.

But what if building isn't about looking a certain way? What if it's about being genuinely, vulnerably open to being reshaped?

The wild part is that the materials that look strongest—my own ideas, my cultural background, my learned behaviors—are often the very things that will burn away. And what remains? Only what's been truly transformed.

I want to build with something that lasts. Something real.