musts vs Grace

I never realised how majestic the authority of the word Grace was, untill I was inspired to look it up. I was brought up in an environment where tithing, going to church, be baptised and attending sunday school was the ONE condition for having your soul saved.

But then God said, "you are not growing!.. what am I going to do with you?" for many years after that I clung to my old traditions until - somewhere in May of 2005 - I was woken up one night in a dream... "I want you to build an Ark" ... Someone said.

It was about two am in the morning and I got out of bed. Still dazed by the what happened, I went outside to the front porch after grabbing the Bible from the couch. I started reading it... looking for answers... or reality anyway because I was still doubting the "happening"

It was a "one year version" of the bible and I paged to the specific date. The reading that day was about the building of the temple and then my eye caught a paragraph where God instructed that a certain room of the temple must be "7 yards in all directions".

I was going to build an ark... 7 yards in all directions... in my backyard!.

Well, it was not the ark mentioned in Genesis, but a place where a couple of people could meet - With God - on any day. I knew this because I always dreamt of having my own little church where I could worship. Never thought it'd be in my backyard though.

Natalie and I prayed about this when I told her the story and we were both extremely excited.

Shortly after that day, I walked out the 7 yards on a spot that was ideal for digging the foundation for the Ark. Just to make sure it was size... I walked 8 yards in al directions instead of 7. I got some steel rods from the garage and hammered them into the corners of what was to become the foundation.

What followed after that day, can only be called a miracle.

Natalie and I went to the bank to get a small loan for the building process. I had to start with tools because what I had in the garage would never be sufficient for any constuction of that kind.

Soon after the loan was approved, I got the tools what I thought was enough to at least start.

Since then I regularly (to my boss's discontent) took the opportunity to split my annual leave into VERY shorter periods that usually fell over weekends, so that I could obey the instruction and build the Ark. Casual labour was a plenty and digging the foundation took a long time thanks to the boulders just under my lawn.



The "ark" - to be continued...