News from Bulgaria on Orphans

Too Big to Fail

The First Evangelical Church of Sofia has a prime piece of real estate in the city center and a vision for serving the community and advancing the gospel.  As you look at the pictures below, notice the fully developed plots on each side of the street.  The working name of this endeavor is the "Gladstone Project."  Gladstone is the name of the street where the property resides.  It is near an intersection of three streets.  I took a picture looking down each street.  If you were to walk through the center of the city and you turned down Gladstone St., you would be struck to see such a large undeveloped lot.  

I tried to take pictures that showed the size that the new building would be (as required by zoning ordinances, but the pictures don't do it justice.  Even though the property is a short distance from the church, I had not been there.  After one of our first committee meetings, Elka who has been a central player in the early stages of the project, walked with me to look at the property.  As we stood across the street from the property (now currently functioning as a paid parking lot), Elka explained the dimensions to me.  There are three tall buildings, with smaller structures built against them.  The smaller buildings will be demolished to make way for the new facility.  It will be required to be the same height as the other three buildings and must be built to touch each of them.  Wow!  I don't know if you will get how massive that must be from the pictures I have taken.  Elka said that when she is working on the project at home it can seem manageable, but when she walks down to look at the property and the enormity of the space, it is easy to feel overwhelmed.  I felt it, too!  In preparation for this blog entry, I spent a morning walking around the neighborhood, taking pictures and visiting some nearby shops.  I settled at a cafe around the corner from Gladstone and ordered a cappuccino.  I opened my Bible and began reading in Genesis where I had left off from the day before.  I began in chapter 11.  This is the chapter that covers the Tower of Babel.  As I read about the pride of the builders of that project, the sense of being overwhelmed a few days before became strangely comforting to me.  We have not come to a place of saying, "Watch us! We can do this!"  The mood from the beginning has been that we need to pray and trust God through this process.  What a sad thing it would be when all is said and done for us to be impressed with the work of our hands and to have forgotten our God.  The Tower of Babel is a sober reminder that no matter how big the building gets, no matter how many skilled people we gather for the work, we can do nothing without our God.  May He never bend down on a knee to get a closer look at "our" work and decide that we have become too proud.  The truth is that we can make our plans in great detail and we can consider all knowable variables, but there is no project, no building, and even no ministry plan that is too big, too important to fail.  But our confidence is not in our plans.  "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7)." We trust in the name of the Lord our God.  This is where our confidence is in this life and where our confidence must be with the Gladstone Project.  And we can be confident in the will of God because unlike people and plans, He alone is too big to fail.