My oldest daughter is doing this drawing/writing prompt thing this month and my wife has joined in for some of the days. I figured I would toss in a few for fun too!
Build
What an imperative! Since before Babel we have been stacking those bricks and placing boards. Nowadays it’s often more metaphorical. Businesses build their “brand”. Yesterday, I typed “build” into a computer’s command line interface to compile an XML validator too that I needed for a project. It didn’t work. Some of the dependencies were jacked up.
What if the builder of the tower woke up one day to lay the next layer of their ziggurat but found the pile of bricks had been inadvertently moved. That really happened once, but the hand of God. It repeats itself now every day, bu the hand of man. Some among us may not openly acknowledge our creator, but we imitate him nonetheless.
Today, I stared at the imperative “build” on my home to-do list. It declared we needed a covered and walled warm winter coop for the chickens and lone duck residing in the back yard. A trip to the lumber yard and four hours later and the coop is complete. My son held the boards in place as I screwed them together. The other son made me a cup of coffee partway through. It came together faster than the XML validator and will doubtless be more durable.
I hope we get the build the New Jerusalem. It would be more like our creator to give us a job to do. But then we’ll have perfect tools and all the right words. That would be more like Him than just plopping it down prefab from the sky, even though that’s what John the Revelator seemed to see the likeness of. Then with each rising, the command “build” would be heard with joy rather than cursing – each new task better than the one before, greeted by the crowing rooster and the quack of the duck, still kept around as comic relief for the builders, world without end.