Blogger Jodie Montgomery
I’ve been staring at the Gateway to the West St. Louis Arch for three days now. I’m in St. Louis with my husband who is at a steel conference. The Arch is steel and quite the engineering feat.
The Gateway Arch is the tallest man-made monument in the United States. It is 630 feet tall and on a clear day you have a 30 mile view from its small windows. The Arch commemorates President Jefferson and the push for the nation to expand to the west. The structure is supported by concrete foundations that extend 60 feet into the ground and triangular steel and concrete sections that were piled one by one up to the sky during construction. The Arch weighs over 43, 000 tons.
What amazes me is that a few hundred men built the Arch in under three years and no one died in the building. I’ve seen the construction pictures and men were perched all along the outsides as the Arch grew taller and taller. They welded, hammered, cleaned, polished, and fitted the huge structure together while dangling from scaffolding supported by the incomplete Arch. I notice no safety lines on the workers in the old construction photos. At times, many men were cramped together way up in the sky on little walkways. If I had been one of the workers, I would have accidentally knocked you off the thing. Heights are dizzying to me and heights without hand rails and safety nets are overwhelming.
When a people come together, amazing things can be accomplished. I’m encouraged when I stare at the Arch to see something beautifully monumental as the outcome when so often our news reveals the destructive path taken by a group of people. A few blocks away the police, camera crews and EMS folks are gathering to get ready for opening day at the ball field. For many this will be a fun family time but in the beer garden next to the stadium there will be a lot of trash to pick up and possibly some lives to save. I see the Arch, the stadium, the emergency folks all from my hotel window. I pray for safe fun in our nation.
There are so many things that I just cannot accomplish on my own. I do not have the resources. The cost is too high. My salvation is one of those things. There is no way I could build a way into the holiness of God. I need the Great Designer. So I stare at His promises of life and I marvel. He constructed the bridge to eternity for His children.
Luke 14: 28-30 For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him,saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’
