Building Bridges
By Doug Bing, Washington Conference president
Have you ever built a bridge?
Maybe you were hiking in the woods and came to a stream and needed to find a way to cross. You found a fallen log and laid it across the stream. Or you found some good rocks and placed them in the stream in order to cross. Some may even have been engineers or construction workers who built actual bridges.
One of the fun school projects is bridge building.
Students are given toothpicks or popsicle sticks to build bridges. The goal is to see how much weight the bridge will hold before it breaks. I have watched a number of demonstrations when the bridges are complete.
More and more weight is placed on the bridge.
The tension in the room is palpable as students wait to see what will happen as the weight increases. Some bridges break fairly quickly. Some bridge designs and careful construction hold tremendous amounts of weight before finally collapsing.
The bridge building class teaches design and construction practices.
By the time you are reading this, election day in the United States will have ended. Television advertisements will have gone off the air. We may or may not know who the new president will be depending on the closeness of the election.
Yet one thing is for certain.
God is still God. God is still in control. God expects his church to build bridges. People who love God and love people. People who build bridges between others and God and walk across the bridge with them.
It will hold your weight.
Jesus said that there are two great commandments. The first is to love God will all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40).
That text doesn’t say to love God with all your heart and then love those who have the same political beliefs as you. It doesn’t say love just the Democrats. It doesn’t say love just Republicans.
It says love your neighbor.
The good Samaritan was of a different religion—and you may even say political party—of the man he cared for when found beaten and in need. Yet he helped him without a thought for himself.
In this time of deep divide in the nation, let us build bridges for everyone, and let our love for Jesus shine through clearly in our love for our neighbors. Let us not let the nation’s divisions creep into the church in how we treat each other and those in our communities. Let’s keep building bridges with Jesus that will never collapse under the strain.