July 10 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Michael Card got it in his head that he wanted to build a log cabin in his back yard. He heard of one sitting idly in a field in Kentucky, and he convinced the landowner to let him disassemble it and take the materials home to Tennessee.Log by log, Card took it apart, put it in his truck, and drove it to Tennessee where, log by log, he reassembled it.This doesn't seem strange except that Card did all the work by hand. He didn't use a backhoe to dig the foundation, he refused help, and he worked in a sort of manic frenzy until the project was complete. "If I were in a prison camp, I dare say that an armed guard could not force me to do the work I drove myself to do on this cabin," he says."When the cabin was finished and I returned to my right mind, I asked myself, 'Where did this come from?'"It came from God, he decided. And it taught him something about God and, in turn, about humans, and especially about American Christians. Card wants us to understand that within each of us there may be a log cabin waiting to be built. And we may be too mesmerized by our culture to sense it and respond by building it.Card says this inexplicable impulse to create is what sets humans apart from the rest of God's creation. It is the very image of God in us. "Within each of us there is a drive, akin to the sexual drive, that causes us to create things we don't always understand," he says.God's signature on this creative impulse has been evident since "the beginning," when he created and beheld the stars, the seas, the days and nights, and living beings—each in its place or on its course—and then called his masterpiece "very good" (Genesis 1:31).The same impulse compelled Moses to build the tabernacle to house the presence of God and overtook ...