Forty Feet Beneath the East River

When engineer Washington Roebling began constructing the Brooklyn Bridge in 1870, the most critical work happened where no one could see it. Workers descended into massive pressurized wooden boxes called caissons, lowered to the bottom of the East River, and dug through layers of mud, rotting timber, and glacial stone to reach solid bedrock. The work was grueling, dangerous, and inglorious. Dozens of men suffered agonizing decompression sickness — including Roebling himself, who was left partially paralyzed and confined to his apartment for the remaining eleven years of construction, watching through a telescope.

But Roebling understood something essential: a bridge spanning 1,600 feet of open water, bearing the weight of thousands daily, could not rest on river silt. It needed bedrock. Every ounce of suffering in those caissons was justified by the certainty that when the great stone towers finally rose above the waterline, they would stand for centuries. And they have.

Paul told the Corinthian church the same truth about their life together. "No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ." We are God's temple — not a temporary structure thrown up on shifting ground, but a sacred dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. The foundation matters more than the facade. Christ alone is the bedrock beneath everything that endures. Build there, and what you raise will stand. Build anywhere else, and no amount of ornamentation will save it.