The Blueprint

The Blueprint



Imagine waking up Christmas morning and receiving an expensive gift under the tree. It’s nicely wrapped, beautifully presented. You tear off the paper, dig through the little Styrofoam peanuts and find the gift. But it needs assembling. So you continue to dig. You dig and dig, frustration beginning to set in. When you finally get to the bottom of the box, there’s no instruction manual. So now you’re left with lots of pieces spread out all over your floor and you have no directions for putting them together.

This takes all the joy out of the day. Your holiday is unfinished. You have a chaos of parts, with no plan for putting them together. You’re on your own to turn the chaos into the pretty picture on the box. What’re you going to do?

For too many of us, our lives look like the same chaos of parts that we sometimes face on Christmas morning. The parts are scattered everywhere, our future is dark and cloudy, and we have no manual to put things together. So what do we do? Where do we turn? One option is to copy the kid across the street. Or maybe we look for answers with the guy on the corner. Or the thug on TV. Or the preacher in the pulpit. Because we think their gifts came with manuals. But in truth, they had no blueprints either. They put their stuff together by copying others, who had copied still others before them--just as you are thinking of copying the ones before you. So what should you do? Do you copy the copies of copies, perpetuating the fraud? Do you fake it? Just grab everything, dump it all together and pray something fits? Do you give up and throw the whole mess away? Or maybe you walk away, leaving the pieces spread out everywhere.

You’ve been given a gift. But without the instruction manual, without the proper plans, that gift loses its value. It’s practically worthless. So if you’re going to get anything out of it, you need a blueprint. And as things go with Christmas presents, so they also go with life. The greatest Giver of all has given you a precious gift--your life. And in order for that gift to be truly valuable to you, you need a blueprint.

Reprinted by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from THE BLUEPRINT by Kirk Franklin.

Copyright © 2010 by Kirk Franklin