The following is a guest post from our friend Matt Appling. Matt is a teacher, pastor and writer. His first book, Life After Art, released on April 1 from Moody Publishers. You can find more information on that at lifeafterartbook.com

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When I was in college, my summer job was delivering phone books.

I know, it wasn’t even that long ago, but the phrase “delivered phone books” already sounds archaic and laughable.  Believe me, many of those phone books were thrown away even then before smartphones existed.

The job took me through all of the oldest parts of town, the streets filled with grand and imposing, century old houses looking down on passers-by…

…Well, many of them were grand and imposing.

Inevitably, next door to a magnificent house would be a house that was on the verge of collapse.  We feared that setting a phone book on the front porch might bring the whole pitiful structure down.

I still think about those old neighborhood streets, filled with some glorious homes and other formerly glorious homes and realize how much they say about the life and faith you and I are creating.

Letting Nature Take Its Course

Of course, no one went into any of those old homes and tried to make them fall apart.  No one smashed the windows or punched a hole in the roof or released a bunch of rodents into the front door.

It just happened.  

Those houses decayed with no human effort at all.  Nature just took over.  Rain slowly punctured the roofs.  The mice quietly nibbled their way in.  A windstorm snuck up and knocked out a window.

It was the houses that were still magnificent, still glorious and impressive that took all the work.  Those people had poured dollars and energy and purposeful work into preserving their homes, constantly fighting off planet Earth’s efforts to destroy their work.

Nature is incredibly destructive.  It wants to weather and erode and rust and rot what we build.  If we just stand back, everything we build will decay.

Effort to Create, No Effort to Decay

Of course, the same is true not just of our houses, but all of the most meaningful parts of our lives.

It takes a lot of effort to create a grand marriage.

We put in years of work to shape our kids into godly adults.

And we invest plenty of time and focus into our faith lives.

Friendships, finances, careers, everything we want in life takes so much effort to create.

But it takes no effort to let these things decay, to fall apart.  If we just sit back, other forces will take over.  We don’t have to work at destroying everything in our lives.  The forces of decay will do that work for us.  Destroying things is easy.

Purposefully Create

What I love about Justin and Trisha’s ministry is their call to purposefully create and maintain our marriages.  We have to be deliberate.  Good marriages do not create themselves.  But they will certainly decay without our attention!

And that is the same heart behind Life After Art.  No one just falls backwards into a vibrant relationship with God.  But we certainly lose our faith when we neglect it.  Our kids don’t just pick up our faith without us nurturing that faith.  Like a house, everything is in a perpetual state of decay.  It’s up to us to be constantly, purposefully creating.

Beautiful things are easy to destroy, but difficult to create.

We are giving away two copies of Life After Art!! To enter to win: leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite art project was in elementary school. Comments must be left by 11:59pm CST on Sunday April 6th. We will pick two random winners.