The House That Built Itself Into Nowhere

In San Jose, California, the Winchester Mystery House sprawls across six acres — 161 rooms, 40 bedrooms, staircases that climb straight into the ceiling, and doors that open onto blank walls. For 36 years, from 1886 until her death in 1922, Sarah Winchester kept construction crews working around the clock. She added room after room with no architect, no blueprint, no unifying plan. The result is a mansion that impresses from the outside but confuses anyone who steps inside. Hallways loop back on themselves. Windows look into other rooms instead of daylight. It is building for the sake of building — impressive activity with no coherent foundation beneath it.

Paul would have recognized the problem immediately. "No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ," he wrote to the Corinthians. They were constructing their community life with the same frantic, planless energy — one faction following Apollos, another following Paul, each adding their own wing to the house without checking whether it connected to anything solid underneath.

But Paul's warning cuts deeper still. "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple?" This is not a solo construction project. The church is a shared dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and every board we nail matters. Every word spoken in a congregation either strengthens or weakens sacred walls.

We are not building a mystery house. We are building on Christ — and the Almighty deserves our most careful, most unified work.