The Rejected Stone of Coventry Cathedral

On the morning of November 15, 1940, German bombers reduced Coventry Cathedral to a smoldering skeleton. Only the outer walls and the blackened spire survived. The people of Coventry stood among the ruins and wept. Everything sacred seemed lost.

But the morning after the bombing, the cathedral's provost, Richard Howard, gathered two charred roof beams from the wreckage and bound them into the shape of a cross. He set that cross on an altar of rubble and wrote two words behind it: "Father Forgive." What the bombs had rejected, what fire had reduced to char and ash, became the cornerstone of something the world had never seen — a ministry of reconciliation that has stretched across seven decades and sixty countries.

Today, the ruins still stand beside the stunning new cathedral built in 1962. Visitors walk through the shattered nave and then pass through a great glass screen into the new sanctuary. The old destruction and the new creation exist side by side, and the journey between them tells the whole gospel in fifty steps.

This is the architecture of Psalm 118. The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. The day of devastation becomes the day the Lord has made. The gates of righteousness swing open not despite the suffering but through it. The steadfast love of the Almighty does not prevent the rubble — it builds cathedrals from it. Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His love endures forever.