Near my home, there is a building filled with wonders.
It’s the Baylor Research and Innovation Cooperative (BRIC for short). Inside are fascinating things like a Space Sciences Lab. That lab includes Mission Design & Data, Satellite Integration, and a Dusty Plasma Simulator. There’s also CASPER (the Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics, and Engineering Research).
When I was a child, I spent hours on my back searching the starry sky for Sputnik, much like those Rocket Boys in the movie October Skies. As I toured the BRIC, I was delighted to discover my inner Rocket Boy was absolutely in awe of all that technology and how it contributes to the study and exploration of outer space.
The BRIC is part research lab central and part business incubator. And, while it houses some pretty amazing stuff, the BRIC itself is as fascinating as what operates within it. What now houses cutting edge science was once … a tire factory.
General Tire opened the plant in the early 1940s. It was a thriving operation. Until it wasn’t. The doors closed for good in the 1980s. Sure, the "bones" were still there; they were always substantial. But what do you do with a tire factory when there is no longer a need for one? Absolutely nothing. So, for decades, it sat—empty, abandoned, useless, worthless.
Circumstance had brought it low. For the longest time, it was lost.
No amount of wishing was going to change that. It would still be just like that if some folks had not decided to redeem it. Like a butterfly, it was reshaped, re-tasked. What was old has passed away; now, as the BRIC, it’s truly a new creation.
All of this week's scriptures are about this same kind of redemption. The Corinthians passage, for example, tells us plainly that, because of Jesus, “the old has passed away” and that “we are a new creation.” Go and read them all through that lens of renewal. Read them and experience a quiet joy spreading across your thoughts and emotions. They are about being brought back from the brink, having new life breathed in, being rescued from evil, coming home.
And so it is with us, obsolete and unable to be what we should be. Then, when we trust in Jesus, our old self is gone, and we are truly a new creation.
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PHOTO (and a brief primer on how caterpillars become butterflies):
https://allanspetcenter.com/how-does-a-caterpillar-turn-into-a-butterfly/
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If you're in Waco on Friday morning, join us at 8:00 for DaySpring’s Lectionary Breakfast. We share a meal and the pleasure of talking about how the words of the Bible actually work in our real lives. We'll be on Zoom** and at Our Breakfast Place.
Blessings,
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Fourth Sunday in Lent (March 27, 2022)
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