Build each other up

Two crews work the same building, and from a distance you might mistake the noise of one for the other. But come closer and the difference is total. The first crew swings to bring things down, sledgehammers into plaster, crowbars under beams, the satisfying crack of something that took years to raise coming apart in an afternoon. The second crew works the slower way, hauling, setting, leveling, raising a wall course by course until a shelter stands where there was none. Into a young church Paul presses the question of which crew they are on, and answers it for them: build each other up, he writes, even as you also do. Then the letter to the Hebrews adds the urgency and the strange schedule of the work. Do it day by day, it says, while it is still called today, because a heart left alone and unencouraged does not stay tender. It quietly hardens, the way ground goes to stone when nothing softens it. Many came through the upheaval having met only the wrecking crew, torn down by people who claimed to swing for God. The turn back toward a people is, in part, this: joining the other crew, learning the daily work of building one another up.

If you were taken apart by people who should have built you up, you know the wrecking crew from the inside, the way a few words can drop a wall it took you years to raise. The reconnected life does not ask you to pretend that never happened. It invites you onto the other crew. Paul's instruction is plain, almost unglamorous: build each other up. And Hebrews names both the stakes and the schedule, day by day, while it is still called today, because the alternative is not neutral. A heart left alone and unencouraged hardens, slowly, in the cold. So become someone's daily encouragement, the steady voice that sets a stone rather than swings at one. And let others do the same for you, which for the once-wounded is often the harder half. The hardening that isolation breeds is not held off by a grand gesture once a year. It is held off by the ordinary, unspectacular, daily work of building one another up.