Old barns dot the landscape in farming communities. Even in Bible times barns and storehouses were essential for storing the crops. Often the barn was built before the house. That is a biblical principle found in Proverbs 24:27, which says: "Make it fit for yourself in the field and afterward build your house." In fact, my dad remodeled the barn before he remodeled the house, because the barn was used for the dairy operation and therefore was profitable. We didn't make any money from the house.

The barn and the farm have been in our family for 200 years. I have lots of memories about the barn, some pleasant and some not so pleasant.

Let's take the pleasant ones first: playing in the haymow, building hiding places among the bales of hay and straw, feeding the baby calves with milk in a bucket, watching men paint the metal roof with silver paint in the summers, filling the silo next to the barn when all the neighborhood teens worked together to haul the wagon-loads of chopped corn from the field to the silo.

The less pleasant ones included: milking the cows twice a day, feeding the cattle in the mangers, cleaning the stables every day, and then each spring hauling out the manure pile which had accumulated behind the barn.

Saying good-bye to the barn

Last summer Dad had the barn torn down because it was too expensive to repair, it was no longer used to store crops or for dairy cattle, and there were taxes and insurance on the building. Dad could not bear to watch it fall down from neglect and decay, as happened on neighboring farms, so he had it dismantled. The wood was all salvaged and reused.

Watching the sturdy old barn come down was an emotional experience. And reflecting on it has made me think of the quality of the workmanship needed to build and the quality of workmanship to tear down. There's a clear comparison between constructive work and constructive words, between building up a structure and building up each other, between building an edifice and edifying people.

The story of building the barn

To build the barn, it took careful planning. It took lots of preparation to gather and prepare the materials. The timbers did not come from Home Depot. They were hewn by hand, one chip at a time from trees that grew on the farm. That took hundreds of hours. Some of the timbers were 40 feet long and still straight after all these years. The nails were hand made, tapered and square-shouldered.

The barn was old when Dad was a kid and he is in his 90s. It was still square and tall after more than 150 years of weathering and faithful service. All the joints were cut by hand and were held together by hardwood pins, which had been driven into place. The siding was Michigan white pine, which was now black with a silver cast from long exposure to the weather. It had never been painted.

The stones of the first floor exterior walls were replaced with cement blocks when I was 10 years old. The barn had survived many storms and three tornadoes that I know about. One tornado picked up the structure intact, tore off the roof, then set the rest of the barn back on the cement block walls.

To erect the barn took teamwork from many men to set the structural pieces upright and to fasten them all together. It was 40 feet by 60 feet by 40 feet high at the peak of the A-frame gable ends.

It also took the teamwork of many women to feed the men who worked on the barn. Barn raisings must have been wonderful events, which built up the people who built up the barns.

The destruction crew

But the barn came down in just three short days with a crew of three men and a few tools: crowbars, chain saws and an extendible boom forklift.

The old barn fought the destruction crew every step of the way. It was still strong after all those years, which was a testament to the quality of the materials and workmanship. The whole family found it to be a very sad emotional experience to watch. Several times I felt like shouting for the men to stop the destruction. They removed the siding first. There stood the bare frame with the roof still intact. The roof came off in sections in a brutally ugly procedure. I did not stay to see them cut the joints to remove the timbers as each of the four vertical racks were lifted and laid on the ground to be cut apart.

Ironically, 30 days after the barn was dismantled, we heard about a new federal government program to preserve old barns...to help farmers keep their barns. The program is called "Barn Again." It provides money for maintenance so that the barns do not have to have "Chew Mail Pouch" on the side or "See 7 States From Rock City" on the roof. But it was too late for Dad's barn.

So what lessons are there for you and me from my ancestors who built the barn and the strangers who tore it down? What about the quality of workmanship for building compared to the quality of workmanship for destruction?

How can we compare building a structure to building relationships with other people in our lives?

Here is a poem I found years ago that makes the first comparison.

Tearing Down Or Building Up?

 

I watched them tearing a building down,
A gang of men in a busy town;
With a heave-ho and a lusty yell
They swung a beam and the building fell.

I asked the foreman: “Are these men skilled,
And the men you’d hire if you had to build?”
He gave a laugh and said, “No indeed,
Just common labor is all I need;
I can easily wreck in a day or two
What builders have taken a year to do.”

And I thought to myself as I went my way,
Which of these roles have I tried to play?
Am I a builder who works with care,
Measuring life by the rule and square?

Am I shaping my deeds to a well-made plan,
Patiently doing the best I can?
Or am I wrecker, who walks the town,
Content with the labor of tearing down?

—Roe Parham Fulkerson (1870-1949)

We can do a lot of wrecking with our deeds. We can wreck in a day or two what took years to build. And you know what? We can do even more wrecking with our words. In minutes we can seriously damage or destroy a relationship that took years to build up.

Each week I drive past the office of a local wrecking company. Their sign reads: "Big or small, we wreck 'em all."

What are we doing? Are we building up with our deeds and words, building an edifice and edifying, or are we wrecking and tearing down?

Paul gave several instructions in his first book to the Thessalonians about how to live. In verse 11 he sums up the first 10 verses of chapter 5 this way: "Therefore, comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing." In other words, build up each other. Don't wreck your relationships. Edify. It is such an important principle than Paul wrote similar instructions to the Romans, Corinthians and Ephesians.

Dad's old barn lasted through several lifetimes. Our close relationships should last for our entire lifetime, and they can last if we build them up or edify with our words and deeds, if we are "patiently doing the best we can."

Let's be builders, not wreckers. It takes more skill, but look at the wonderful results. As Paul also told the Romans, "Let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another" (Romans 14:19).

Can we build it? Yes, we can.