SDfAoWOP: Babel

Day Six

Genesis 11:9

Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

The two threads, entwined painfully together, the thread of confusion and the thread of dispersion, form the tapestry of modern life. Either I am confused in all my doings, or all my way is scattered before me. I try to keep everything and everyone going the same direction, threading the narrow way of unity and love, but my efforts are daily ending in discord and disunity.

Many days of frustration and strife, though, for you, sitting in your quiet disordered and disheartened corner, can be gathered together as a blessing. The order and the unity of the men and women, laboring idolatrously together on their tower, making a name for themselves, brick upon insolent brick would have led to the ultimate and most devastating chaos and confusion possible–the chaos and confusion of a life without God, the dispersing of reason through worshipping the wrong thing.

Your disorder and frustration provides the fertile ground of God's own work. As you fail to keep things together, there is the chance that he can put you together, brick by reasonable and humble brick. Even your language, your scattered thoughts, can be given to him to make sense, to become true. Ultimately he gathers all his own together, not in a tower, but in a warm and gracious pasture, and his voice calls out, in order, in unity, those whom he loves to work and to love in beauty and in peace.