Firm Foundations

Recently my wife and I visited Pisa in Italy to see the famous ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa.’ It was an amazing sight! It’s a bell tower with a maximum height of almost 186 feet, and weighing 14,500 tonnes, and leaning by 4 degrees. This doesn’t sound a lot until you see exactly how much it is leaning and wonder how it can possibly still stand.

Allow me to give you a very brief history of the Tower. Work started in 1173, and it began to lean very early on in its construction due to a combination of shallow foundations and poor soil. Nevertheless, work continued on and off over a period or two hundred years, due to wars interrupting things. An attempt was made, when constructing the last three floors, to counteract the lean by curving the top three floors in the opposite direction of the lean. However, it was too little, too late. As the lean continued, it was finally decided (between 1993-2001) to stabilise the construction by injecting concrete into the foundations. This was a long, arduous and expensive task, which has worked, and the Tower is now fully stable.

Let’s try and apply this to our lives. Most of our spiritual and emotional problems go back to poor or unstable foundations. It’s things that happened to us way back in our past. It might be things that were done to us, or things we did to ourselves. It could even be things we did to others. Yet we soldier on regardless, believing (as the early construction workers) that there is nothing we can do about it, so we must just carry on.

When we finally begin to realise that things are not right with us, and we need to do something about it, we can resort to some strange things, such as alternative forms of healing, new age worship, meditation, drugs, alternative religions, or cults. That’s much like the weird attempt by the builders with the last three floors. Eventually, we may be able to stabilise ourselves to some degree after much effort, but the problem (the lean) is still visible to people around us by our behaviour, even if we try to tell ourselves we are OK.

With hindsight, the answer to the problem of the Leaning Tower of Pisa was to go back to the root of the problem as soon as things started to go wrong. It had to be the foundations. That would have been the best solution, rather than carrying on as if nothing had happened, or thinking that it would eventually put itself right. The answer to our deep-rooted problems causing deviation in our lives and making us deeply unhappy is Jesus. He alone can put things right if we go to Him and invite Him into the deep places of our lives. Making Jesus Lord our lives enables Him to begin to put in place the only truly stable foundation that will last. Ministry might then be needed, but the end result is that we are not going to be the human version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but a perfectly stable and upright child of God, filled with His joy and peace.