The House that Richard Built
Lessons Learned as a Carpenter’s Son
James D. Smith
Published by All Star Press
© Copyright 2012 All Star Press
All Rights Reserved
e-book version
ISBN 978-1-937376-08-6
All rights reserved solely by the author. The author guarantees all contents are original and do not infringe upon the legal rights of any other person or work. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the author. The views expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the publisher.
Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, CHRISTIAN STANDARD BIBLE. Copyright © 2004 by Holman Bible Publishers.
DEDICATION
To my family, who taught me some of the most valuable lessons in life:
To James Webber Davis, my grandfather, for setting my feet on a firm foundation for excelling in life;
To Flossie Davis, my grandmother, for being the heart and soul of our family;
To Peggy E. Cain, my mother, for giving me an example of service that comes closer to Jesus than anyone I know;
To Bob and Phyllis Johnston, my uncle and aunt, for being the biggest givers that I know;
And to Richard E. Cain, my stepfather - the carpenter and inspiration for this book
The House that Richard Built
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Lessons: Start with a plan
The foundation must be strong
Measure twice, cut once
While it was still dark
Focus on the nail
No pain, no gain
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right
You can’t do it all
You can’t judge a "house" by its cover
Nothing survives the fire!
Book sense but no common sense
People do you wrong, do right anyway
When the roof comes crashing down
Gone fishin!
Epilogue: The Carpenter’s Son
Introduction
I am nearing 40 years old. For some that may seem young. For others, like my children, that puts me almost into the grave. I have come to learn that where you stand in life is a matter of perspective. I have decided that 40 is a good number. 40 is a good point to stop for a moment and catch my breath. It has been a wild ride! A few years ago, I was hiking out at Zion National Park in Utah. I tried to convince the ranger to allow me to hike in an area of the park that was closed due to rattlesnake activity. (I have always been a somewhat adventurous type. I think that I got that from my grandfather who, as a teenager, hopped a freight train with a friend from his home in central Kentucky to Cincinnati, Ohio.) Anyway, the ranger convinced me that I did not want to camp with rattlesnakes and so I settled for hiking in a safe area of the park. I parked my car, threw my gear on my back and away I went. Zion is a beautiful park and the area in which I was backpacking was one of the most beautiful places I have been. I hiked for hours until I found a nice sandy spot that looked free of rattlesnakes. I pitched my tent and set up my camp for the night. The sun was going down and as I sat there eating my dehydrated noodles, I was able to look back down into this beautiful valley through which I had passed. There was not another human being within 50 miles of me; there was only me, mountain lions, rattlesnakes and God. Since I was in no hurry to spend time with mountain lions or rattlesnakes, I decided to just sit back and spend my evening with God.
I looked back over my life and talked to God about all the ups and the downs. I had been married and I had been divorced. I had experienced the joy of having children and the devastating pain of them being hurt. I had become a disciple of Jesus and I had sunk into some dark, sinful places. At the time, I was a single parent but I had recently met a woman that would eventually become my best friend and wife.
As I looked back over the best of times and the worst of times, I felt God lifting a veil from my heart and letting me see what lay behind the things my eyes could see. Even in the dark places of my life there had been a light to guide me. Even when I did not have the strength to go on, there had been hands carrying me. Even when I found no purpose to life, a greater divine purpose was directing it all.
I thought about my family, the collection of people that whether by accident or divine providence had been thrown together to start me down this journey. Oftentimes, we look at those closest to us with a critical heart. We spot the flaws and blemishes easily. I think this is our nature as sons and daughters of Adam. But aren’t all families flawed in some way? I have yet to meet a family that wasn’t dysfunctional, some just more so than others.
I have to say that my family is a good family. My family members are just good ole folk. Each one of us has our little quirks and flaws, but a finer group of people you will not find on planet Earth. And they did something for my brother, my sister and me that I am sure goes unnoticed and unappreciated most of the time. They laid a foundation that has helped me weather many storms and climb many mountains.
During that evening in the mountains of Zion with God (is there any more appropriate place to meet God); I came to see things differently. God could have put me with any family anywhere in the world. When He was knitting babies together in 1968, God reached up on his shelf to pull out a soul and He grabbed mine. He could have put it in any number of other bodies he constructed that day. But when He breathed life into the baby in my mother’s womb, He knew exactly what He was doing.
My grandfather was a great man. In fact, he was the greatest man I have ever known. He was a soldier, a policeman, a sheriff, a farmer, and a businessman. He was a man of adventure, always telling stories that I would have loved to have lived out myself. If I could live a life other than my own, it would be his that I would want to live.
My grandmother was even greater because Jesus says that the greatest among us will be a servant (Matt 23:11). She had a heart of gold. To this day, when I talk to others about her they always talk about how she welcomed people into her home. Her fried chicken was the stuff of legends and you never left her house hungry (maybe in need of exercise but never hungry). Whenever I read Jesus’ words where he tells his disciples that he did not come to be served but to serve, I think of my grandmother.
My mother was just like my grandmother, a servant to the core of her being. I learned so much about love for family from her. From her I learned that love is an action and not just a feeling. I learned that love is sacrifice of self. She taught me that lesson from her example of tireless and selfless devotion.
By the time that I grew up enough to start remembering things and growing into a man, my mother had married Richard, the carpenter. I’ll be honest, as a child of divorce it is hard to accept someone new in the role of father. It did not come easily, but if my rejection of this man that loved my mother hurt, he never showed it. He never treated me as a stepson even when I never treated him as a father. He treated me and my brother as his own sons. He was a carpenter and I remember vividly going with him to work on weekends and during the summers.
This book is not about my stepfather or my family, it is about me. It is about lessons I learned growing up that have helped me in life. You see, I was a carpenter’s son. I got to watch and learn from one of the best carpenters that I know. I had no idea at the time how the lessons I learned would prepare me for life.
I am no carpenter by trade but I have discovered that we are all building something in life. We are building families, marriages, careers, eternal treasures and legacies. We are builders, each and every one of us.
Richard builds houses for a living. We are building so m
uch more. Does the son of a carpenter have anything that he can teach you? I am thankful that I was taught how to build. In this book, I pass on to you the wisdom of a carpenter. I pray that by applying these lessons, your life will be touched and changed in some way for the better.
Lesson 1 - Start with a Plan
Lines scratched on a piece of paper with numbers everywhere were what met my eyes. That is what the first house that Richard built for our family looked like to a young boy the first time I saw it. The boxes and figures meant nothing to me. I thought you built a house like my brother and I had built a clubhouse – you start nailing boards together and out comes a building. But this was not how the carpenter did it. He had spent hours with his pencil and ruler, drawing and measuring and erasing and drawing again. I had seen him build houses before and had seen the rolled up pieces of blue paper he had often used. I always assumed they were instructions.
I looked over the drawings as he showed them to my mother. "This is the bathroom," he said. It looked like a box to me. "And here are the kid’s rooms." More boxes.
"What is this?" I asked, pointing to a box within a box in a box.
"The tub," the carpenter said.
"I could draw a better tub than that," I thought to myself. It didn’t even look like a tub.
A few days later, I was standing in an empty field looking at four stakes in the ground. The carpenter looked at the paper, measured the stakes, looked at the paper, moved the stakes, measured, looked, moved, measured, looked; it went on and on. To a young boy, it seemed to take forever to even start to build a house.
Then something amazing happened. Over the next couple of weeks, the lines on that paper became real. The foundation was laid just where the carpenter wanted. The floor was built and the walls went up, just as the carpenter had wanted. The roof took shape and everything came together. Where there was nothing but an empty field before, now there was a house. We moved in and lived there for several years.
I drove by that house not too long ago. There is a new family living there but I remembered when the house was nothing but lines on a piece of paper. I remembered when the house was nothing but a vision of the carpenter, a vision put down on paper in a plan.
I learned from the carpenter that you cannot build something of value without first having a vision for what that building project would look like. You must start with a plan. From a house to a marriage to a family to a career to a relationship with God Almighty, planning is one of the first steps that you must take. Yet many of us try to build like my brother and I — by nailing together whatever boards we can find and calling it a house.
A real carpenter takes time to plan what he is going to build before he starts. Consider God, the ultimate planner.
"Your eyes saw me when I was formless; all my days were written in Your book and planned before a single one of them began."
Psalm 139:16
God has a vision for our lives, a plan written before He even began building you. If God is a planner and has a vision for you, shouldn’t we be excellent planners as well. If you want to succeed in anything, you must become a consistent planner.
Commit your work to the LORD, and then your plans will succeed. Proverbs 16:3 (NLT)
Consider this: God’s plans are to "prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV)
There have been times in my life when I did not feel prosperous. There were times that my hope was small and my faith in a better future was weak. As I look back on those times, I have come to realize that those dark times were not due to the failure of God’s plans but from my failure to follow the plan or not plan at all.
Divorce is a very trying time for anyone. I do not know anyone who grows up wanting to go through this very trying event. I have been there and done that. I wonder how my failure to have a vision for a great marriage with my first wife contributed to my poor marriage. And I wonder how many couples walking down the aisle this month have a solid plan for building a marriage that is strong enough to last forever? The truth of the matter is that most people do not even have a clue, much less a vision or plan. If we were a little bit more like God, the ultimate planner, perhaps we would avoid some of the tragedies and mistakes of our lives.
Think about your relationship with God. If we can make plans for a great marriage or for a house, why do we not make plans for our Christian walk? Do you have a plan for how you are going to deepen your faith? On how you are going to use your gifts for advancing God’s Kingdom? On how you are going to serve the poor? Study your Bible? Without a vision and a plan, expect to be at the same place spiritually in five to ten years that you are right now.
The same principles apply to our families. Do you have a solid plan for teaching your children the life lessons that they need to learn? Or is your plan to rely on Sunday Schools, youth groups, and public schools to prepare your kids for life?
So, from what plans are you building? Do you even have a plan for the things in your life that are important to you? Are you building on purpose or throwing together whatever boards you find lying around? Do you have a plan for building your marriage and your family or are you expecting things to work out on accident? What about your career? Do you know where you want it to go? What about your spiritual life? Do you have a plan for improving your relationship with God?
The carpenter taught me that before you start you must start at the end, with what you want the final product to look like. Take some time now to get a piece of paper and a pencil. Start doing some planning. Write out where you want to be in 5, 10 and 20 years. Look at the following areas of your life and design what you are going to invest your years into building.
Practical Application:
Relationship with God (What does a great relationship with God look like to you? What plans can you make to improve your walk with God? Do you have a vision for using your gifts? Do you have a plan for Bible Study and prayer?)
Your marriage (What kind of marriage do you want? What kind of husband/wife do you want to be? What’s your plan?)
Your family (What five words do you want your children to think of when they think about your family? What kind of father/mother do you want to be? What’s your plan for becoming that?)
Lesson 2 – The Foundation Must be Strong
Do you know how much a concrete block weighs? Well, neither do I. But to a skinny, young boy from Kentucky, they seem to weigh about a hundred pounds each.
Richard was a carpenter, not a mason. He would always have someone else build the foundation for the houses that he would build. I have watched him check and double-check the foundation. He would be there when it was being poured, making sure that those that were laying it did it right. He would fuss and cuss when we built on something that wasn’t exactly right. It seems that a tiny flaw in the foundation would make it hard to get the rest of the house right.
At one time or another, I helped the carpenter do everything that goes into building a house. I have done floors, walls, ceilings, roofs, siding, doors, windows, cabinets, carpet, etc… But I had never worked on a foundation until one summer when I was in high school and I was hired by a mason to help lay a foundation for an apartment complex. It was a one time job and all I had to do was carry concrete blocks to the mason who would then lay them as part of the foundation. After the first day, I thought I was going to die! I thought my arms were literally going to just fall off my body. Considering everything on the whole house, laying a foundation is by far the hardest of them all.
A foundation consists of blocks stacked on top of each other, cemented together with mortar. The mortar itself has to be mixed a certain way, too runny and it will not support the blocks, too dry and it will not harden properly, too much sand and it will not last, too much concrete mix and it simply will not work. And then the blocks have to be laid perfectly. Thousands of pounds are going to be sitting on them for as long as the house remains. If it is not right, the house is not going to stand.
It is simple; you pour concrete in a huge slab the shape of the house. You then put the floor and the walls directly on the concrete. Slab construction is like building on a solid rock, the house is going nowhere. A tornado can come along and take away the rest of the house but the foundation will remain.
There are many people in life that are building things on faulty and weak foundations. Some are building on no foundation at all. As for me, I have learned that you must build on a foundation that will last. Jesus himself tells us to do this. In Matthew, Jesus leaves us with this analogy:
"Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a sensible man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of Mine and doesn’t act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. And its collapse was great!"
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