The Tower That Wanted to Be Famous

Once, the whole world spoke one language. Every person, every family, everywhere, used the very same words. And one day they came together on a wide, flat plain, and they had an idea.

"Let's build a city," they said. "Let's build a tower. A tower so tall it touches the sky."

So they made bricks. They baked them hard in the fire and stacked them up, higher and higher.

And why were they building it? They said, "Let's make a name for ourselves. Let's be famous. Let's be so big that nobody can ever scatter us, and everybody will know who we are."

Deep down, they were a little afraid. Afraid of being small. Afraid of being forgotten. So they thought, if we can only get big enough, high enough, important enough, then we will be safe.

Maybe you have felt that too. The feeling of wanting to be big, of wanting everyone to look at you and say your name.

God looked at the tower. It was so very tall to them, but to God it was tiny. So tiny that he had to come down, way, way down, just to see it at all. A whole tower reaching for heaven, and God had to lean low to find it.

It made him sad. His children were trying to make themselves safe by climbing up, when all along he only ever wanted to gather them close. Long before, when the flood ended, he had hung his bow in the clouds as a promise. They did not need a tower to be safe. They already had him.

So God did a surprising thing. He mixed up their words. Suddenly one person said "bricks," and the other heard only noise. Nobody could understand anybody. The building stopped. And the people who tried so hard not to be scattered, scattered. They spread out all over the earth, each one speaking a different sound.

They wanted a name. Instead they lost each other.

But the story does not end on that lonely plain.

Because one day, far ahead, Someone else would come. He would not climb up to grab a name. He would come down, lower than anyone, lower even than the tower-builders ever dreamed. He would make himself small. A baby. A servant. A man who washed dirty feet, and let himself be lifted up on a cross, with no name at all but a mocking one.

And his Father, who loves to lift up the lowly, gave him the highest name there is. The name above every name. The very thing those builders ached for, given to the One who gave himself away.

And what did Jesus do with that name?

He went out to find the scattered ones. All of them. Every language, every far-off corner where the people drifted that day on the plain. He began calling them home, one by one, into one family. And he will not come home missing a single child.

The tower never reached the sky. But Jesus did. And he is reaching still, all the way down, to gather you.