The Keystone Nobody Sees

When the old limestone bridge on Route 7 in Millbrook started showing cracks, the county called in a structural engineer named Carol Reeves. She spent two days walking it, tapping stones, running her hands along the mortar joints. Finally, she gathered the town council in the bridge's shadow and pointed to a single wedge-shaped stone pressed at the crown of the arch.

"That's your keystone," she said. "Every stone in this arch pushes against it. Remove it, and in thirty seconds you'd have a pile of rubble in the creek."

Nobody had thought much about that stone. People crossed the bridge every day going to work, dropping kids at school, heading to church on Sunday mornings. The bridge was just — there. The keystone was invisible in its function, not because it hid, but because it did its job so completely that no one noticed the holding.

Paul writes in Colossians that Christ is the one "in whom all things hold together." Not some things. All things. The atoms in the pew you're sitting on. The neurons firing in your mind right now. The turning of seasons, the orbit of planets, the biological machinery that keeps your heart beating while you sleep.