The other day, I was following a conversation on Twitter about how, right out of the blue, you could be ostracized socially, or even ‘cancelled’, for holding beliefs that were perfectly fine the day before yesterday. One user quipped, “You know, trying to live your life under a rock somewhere is not as safe as it used to be!” In the same vein, back in 1969, in a time of personal angst about the direction of the current culture, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones wrote:

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh, yeah, I'm gonna fade away

It is disconcerting how the cultural and even some religious institutions that we once believed were rock solid are not immune to the swirling currents of the culture’s whims. The cornerstones of those structures are being eroded away.

Where do we find the personal cornerstone for our lives that can withstand the tides of the floods that threaten to sweep us into the abyss? For a lot of us at some point in our lives, Jesus was a stumbling block, someone who just got in our way, so we tossed him
off to one side of our lives. Peter says in Acts 4:11, “This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone.” If we now find ourselves in a position where we must reassess our core beliefs, we may have to swallow our pride and retrieve that cornerstone from the pile of things that we, in our flawed human wisdom, had previously rejected.

The Bible refers to Christ as both the ‘cornerstone’ and the ‘capstone of the arch’. The cornerstone is the first foundational stone to be laid and the capstone is the last stone to be laid. The capstone is the stone where all the horizontal and vertical forces of the building are resolved. Jesus is not only our load bearing foundation, but he is also there with us at the ultimate tension point of our lives. Structurally, he is both our Alpha and Omega. To bear witness to this interior strength, we must concretely live out our lives for Christ.

To my online friend whose current attempt at salvation consists of trying to live under a rock somewhere, and to Mick Jagger who may still be seeking some shelter, I’d like to quote Colossians 3:3: “For you have died (faded away to this world), and your life has been hidden with Christ in God.”