Original Intentions

In the lobby of where I work there is a red velvet rope blocking off about half of the building, this part of the lobby is closed to the public and is used as meeting space for the main tenant.

I know it may seem silly but this really bothers me. See as a child I dreamed of being an architect so whenever I see an architects design botched it makes me upset (same is true for the post 9-11 remodels of airports, many of which ruined the original vision for the spaces).

It reminds me of a visit I had to the Chicago Art Institute. In one of the lobbies from floor to ceiling are architecture pieces. Frank Lloyd Wright has quite a few here. Angles, arches, window frames all just hanging on a plain white wall. Taken from the original vision they can still be appreciated but not as the design imagined.

The same is true in life. So often we have plans and when we show people a small part of this vision they like but don’t truly understand the whole vision.

A beautiful arch can be designed into an ugly house and a ugly window can be a part of a wonderful office building. When we take a larger design and focus on one small aspect of it we don’t even get a small picture of what it is.

The same is true is churches, in politics, in business. While one aspect may look good or bad that’s not a scale for the whole design. We must strive in life to keep things as they were intended. We must be conscious of what the overall design is, not just the arches or columns of the design.

I struggle with this so much personally. I am infamous for only telling one small part of the overall idea. Politicians do this all the time also, they tell part of the story but not the whole overall story.

As this election season progresses let’s be looking for the overall stories and not just quick facts pulled from them.

As this church season ramps up be can we be cautious of when we use only part of the parable, part of the verse. Let’s be wise on how the whole song fits together.

The same is true for ministries and businesses. Ministries never work in a vacuum, they work with other ministries. So often we focus on the Human Relations department or the youth ministry when we actually need to focus on how the youth department relates to the arts department and how the Human Relations relates to the Accounting.

A building is a mixture of tons of small details put together. Imagine a house that has faulty nails in it, it would fall! The same is true in life, without the smallest details focused on what you or I try to do may fail.

This season let’s focus on all the details, no matter how big or small, to find the whole story before critiquing it.

(Its harder than it sounds!)