The Cornerstone
The Builders
The poem this work is built on.
A word before you read it. Longfellow wrote in a builder’s language — a life raised stone by stone, a day at a time. He is not saying that illness, loss or a hard season is anyone’s own doing. He is saying that the small work nobody sees is the work that holds, and that no day is wasted that lays one stone true.
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme. Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest. For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen. In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For God sees everywhere. Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where God may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean. Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb. Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.
The Builders, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Printed here in full, as he wrote it, with one exception: where the poem reads “the Gods”, it is set here as God.
Longfellow published The Builders in 1849, in his collection The Seaside and the Fireside. It stands at the front of this work because it holds the idea the rest is built on — that a life is raised the way a wall is raised, one ordinary day laid upon the last.
That does not mean the days fall evenly, or gently. It means the material is still real, and still in hand: what a person thinks, and what a person seeks. The deepest building of all is the seeking — a life, and an eternity, founded on God and on His Word.
“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
Matthew 7:7
Where this goes next
Thirty days, one at a time.
The devotionals take the same idea and give it thirty short days — a Scripture, a page to write on, and one thing to carry into the day.
May your thoughts be bright and your life beautiful.The Bright Beautiful Life
