Playing with Blocks

Don’t you love playing with blocks? I never grew up when it came to blocks. And I’m not fussy about the types.

Old-fashioned wooden blocks urge me to get on the floor with our grandchildren and build. Colorful wooden shapes: cubes, rectangular and triangular prisms, cylinders, wedges, and more. We build towers, castles, bridges. We learn colors, shapes, principles of engineering and architecture.

And we learned biblical life principles.

How, you ask? Let’s find out.

Foundations

The first thing we show children when building with blocks comes with the foundation. In the typical set of wooden building blocks for kids, several large rectangular ones serve best as the foundation for their towers. Of course, if your children are anything like mine and my grandchildren, they deny the need for a solid foundation and start with whichever block catches their fancy. Most times, this ends in a crash long before they complete the tower.

Many of you, like me, may have taught your children the song, “The Wise Man Built His House upon the Rock.” Kids all love it when the “house on the sand went splat,” complete with sound effects. When our kids’ towers tumbled, we’d talk of building on “The Rock,” Jesus, our one True Foundation.

As children (and we adults) create those block foundations, they can learn how life built on a foundation of Scripture helps them know how to live right. A foundation of love helps them love their neighbors; a foundation of forgiveness helps them not become bitter at others; a foundation of inner peace helps them deal with big emotions.

A Foundation of Scripture

I love playing with blocks. Did I mention that? Did I also mention my love affair with the blocks of today? LEGOs®, K’Nex, and more recently, Magna-Tiles®! Let’s discuss the magnificence and diversity of LEGOs®.

When our youngest daughter asked what I’d like for Christmas, I said, unashamedly, “A LEGO set!” (And yes, she got me one!)

LEGOs® delight me in many ways. First is the incredible selection of shapes and sizes. Some sets include unique-to-that-set pieces, such as snowflake-shaped ones to create the flowers. Some offer movement options—axles for wheels and ells for hinges.

And can we talk about the possibilities with building blocks that do NOT fall apart if I bump into my creation? (Not easily, anyway.) When building with LEGOs®, adding additional blocks comes easily, and in fact, taking the creations apart needs a thin object to pry them away from each other.

When we learn Scripture, building one on another completes the story of us and our world – from creation in Genesis to the return of Jesus in Revelations. Several Scriptures add onto each other, such as 2 Peter 1:5-8: “But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (NKJV) Now, that’s a good foundation!

A Foundation of Peace

When we played with blocks in my childhood, we’d use both colored wooden blocks and another wooden type: Lincoln logs. You may find it interesting, as I did when researching these blocks, to discover they had nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln except for the designer, John Lloyd Wright, choosing the name because of the log cabin of Lincoln’s youth. The idea came from Wright’s design for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, a technique known for withstanding earthquakes.

Anyone who’s lived through or watched news reports about earthquakes knows discussing earthquakes and peace under the same subtitle seems a bit off. But let’s chat about how the Lincoln logs notches hold a cabin together. In the 1990s, we bought a set of Lincoln log-style blocks, but with squared-off logs instead of the original round ones. After building a house with them, including windows and a door, we could actually pick them up and move them while keeping them intact. Even the dog creating a mini earthquake by running past and bumping into them didn’t cause them to cave.

And so it is with those of us who know Jesus. Ephesians 2:14 says, “For He Himself is Our Peace.” When we set up a foundation in Jesus, He becomes not only a solid foundation for our lives, but He also brings peace into our lives. John 14:27 attests to that: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (NIV) As one Lincoln log settles into the slots of the others, may our trust in Jesus settle His peace into our lives.

A Foundation of Forgiveness

I love playing with blo … um, MAGNA-TILES®! These wonderfully fun blocks hit the shelves in 1997, but I never knew about them until we had grandchildren. I fell in love the moment I first sat on the floor with our grandsons and watched colorful, flat, translucent squares and triangles become amazing creations through their side edges being magnetized! The architectural designs in my imagination exploded right along with theirs.

When building with MAGNA-TILES®, rather than only a single foundation block, the key to solid builds lies more in the stabilizing of the sections as you build up. I’ve watched our grandkids build cube upon cube to create a tower taller than they are … with Grandma’s help, of course with the upper tiers. It teeters as it grows, but a little nudge here and there brings back the stability.

And so it is with us when we let small blocks of grievances build up taller and taller. We start to waver under the pressure of negative feelings and unforgiveness. To get us back to standing tall and right, we must forgive “seventy times seven times,” as Jesus suggested in Matthew 18:21-22. Only then will we feel stabilized.

A Foundation of Sin vs. Salvation

Let’s return to the building toys of old: Tinkertoys, those building toys with wooden rods and circles and plastic add-on pieces. Sometimes, the builds look like a chemistry-class element, molecules, or galaxies. But they sure gave us hours of imagination-filled playtime.

Today, the closest building toy resembling Tinkertoys would be K’Nex. Again, these intrigue me. Our youngest used them in homeschooling to study simple physics, machines, and motion. Unlike Tinkertoys, mini motors can mobilize K’Nex creations. Our daughter designed a project in which she used one motor to operate three amusement park rides. But it looked like a jumbled mess when she started taking it apart. It wasn’t as easy to unbuild as it was to build.

Same as sin when it begins weaving into our lives. It can look like a plaything, but too soon, it turns into a mess resembling a K’Nex creation in the throes of disassembling. Often, help is necessary “ … for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23, NKJV)

The Best Build of All

Enter the final type of building blocks … and this one, to be perfectly honest and much to our grandson’s chagrin, befuddles me—Minecraft! But, you say, that’s a video game! Yes, it is, but a building game in which the builder uses blocks to build. These blocks come in assorted styles, colors, and materials. Along with simple wood and concrete blocks, our youngest granddaughter likes the terracotta ones and those with pink azalea leaves. And my favorites (to watch THEM build with) are the cobblestone and granite blocks.

The idea in these builds is to mine for or otherwise obtain the blocks for your inventory, then choose the ones you want for your build. I’ve watched them build some very inventive designs.

But I’ve also seen them destroy their creations with blocks of TNT or lava, especially when playing in “survivor mode,” as they tell me it’s called when they must defeat enemies while building.

Sounds a bit like our world, huh—existing in “survivor mode” to get through this life. BUT we have a unique foundation on our side—the foundation of salvation through Jesus Christ Our Lord, who died for us, for our sins. He disassembled the foundation of sin to allow us “to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9, NKJV), and built an eternal life for us in His Kingdom in Heaven. I’m glad Jesus is the Master Builder.

What other biblical life principles have you learned through playing with blocks—real or virtual? Share your thoughts in the comments. Blessings!