"And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock.”
Matthew 7:25
When I was a young single missionary living in Austria, one of my favorite retreats was a village in the lake district in the Austrian Alps. Hallstatt is a thousand year old town tucked between a towering mountainside and a deep lake. To get there, I had to take a train from Vienna. I would step off the train onto a small platform standing all by itself on the other side of the lake, then walk a few steps to a dock where a boat would take me the rest of the way to Hallstatt. As I stood at the back of the tiny boat, with the soft spray of the lake blowing in my face, I always noticed the remains of a small rock castle built on the side of the mountain.
One weekend I had taken my mother and a friend to visit this favorite retreat. We dined on a lovely deck outside our quaint hotel, which fronted the water, then retired to our rooms. Within an hour, however, a ferocious storm engulfed the whole area. The electricity in the town suddenly went off. We looked out our third-story windows and saw, in the darkness, that the deck where we had recently eaten was now flooded with violent, tossing waves.
As we peered fearfully across the lake, everything seemed to be moving sideways and up and down. The high winds were blowing the torrents of rain sideways, the trees were bent over, and everything seemed to be caught up in the violence of the storm. An enormous flash of lightning illuminated the black sky. And suddenly I saw the outline of the stone castle, standing constant amid a storm that was shaking everything else to its core.
I have never forgotten the sense of strength and solidity I felt, gazing at that old structure that had not been daunted by centuries of such storms. It has become to me a picture of what God has created a home to be.
Women are created to be home-builders, (Prov. 14:1, The wise woman builds her house,). But the reality is, there are so many storms that come our way trying to destroy our homes and tear them apart.
A faithful mom is not someone who is perfect in following all of her ideals but one who is willing to believe that God is good and that He will help us through all the ups and downs. A mama who puts one foot in front of the other day after day, year after year.
And when she gets to the end of her journey, she finds that building on the rock of God's word, enduring by faith through all the storms, she will find her house standing strong with faith alive because of the way she was willing to build.
May God grant you to see that your faithfulness matters and that He wants to keep us safe through the journey. He wants, even more than we do, to have us find His blessing as we faithfully follow hard after His leading.
Does your home feel this way—sturdy, founded on a rock? What might cause it to feel (and be) more so?
