{"id":3993,"date":"2024-09-11T08:56:49","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T12:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=3993"},"modified":"2024-09-11T08:57:58","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T12:57:58","slug":"repairer-of-broken-walls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/11\/repairer-of-broken-walls\/","title":{"rendered":"Repairer of Broken Walls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>

Today the Empire Limestone Quarry near the southern Indiana town of Bedford is eerily quiet.  

Through most of the 20th century, however, it was one of the busiest industrial centers in the Midwest.  

Expert stonecutters removed hundreds of thousands of tons of Salem limestone, which is widely regarded as the finest limestone on the planet.    

Limestone is the geological by-product of countless tiny sea creatures that lived and died in the shallow ocean that used to cover most of the central United States.  

The calcium carbonate from their decomposing shells, which settled upon the bottom of the sea over millions of years, gradually formed the smooth, cream-colored rock which looks so beautiful on the facades of buildings all over the world.

Bedford limestone, in fact, is the featured component in a Who’s Who of famous structures. 

Much of Chicago was rebuilt with stone from southern Indiana after the Great Fire of 1871. The Empire Quarry supplied 18,630 tons of limestone for the Empire State Building in the early 1930’s. The Washington Cathedral, the Pentagon, Yankee Stadium, and the Biltmore Estate are on the list, too. So are hundreds of buildings on various college campuses and a remarkable 35 of 50 state capitol buildings. 

But the drills began to fall silent about a half century ago. The limestone industry fell victim to the growing popularity of glass and metal facades.  

Breaking Away<\/em>, the surprise winner of the Golden Globe for Best Picture in 1979, tells the story of four Indiana University students who are social outcasts because they are local kids. They compete in IU’s annual Little 500<\/em> bicycle race. Their team is called the Cutters. 

The film depicts the encroaching poverty of southern Indiana towns that had depended on the quarries. The dad of one of the main characters reveals that even though he had helped supply the limestone for the elegant buildings on IU’s campus, he had never really felt accepted there. 

Today the quarries seem beautiful but haunted. 

Rainwater and groundwater have filled the primary excavation space of the Empire Quarry. Local kids and college students, much like the Cutters in the movie, routinely “cliff dive” into its deep aquamarine waters.  

Then came September 11, 2001.

Within a few weeks, the limestone cutters still active in the Bedford area got a special order. They were asked to provide 15,000 cubic feet of stone to repair the damage that the Pentagon had sustained from the terror attacks. The newly repaired building was rededicated exactly one year later, on September 11, 2002.  

Seven hundred years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah made this dramatic statement: “Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings” (Isaiah 58:14).

In every generation, God’s people have been called to fill in the world’s breaches; to repair what is shattered; to help restore the hope of those whose hope has been blown away.

That’s because our call is the very thing God himself does.

He is the Repairer of Broken Hearts and Lives.  

God quarries his grace to fill in the gaps where we have lost our hope, our courage, and our willingness to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And the best news of all?

He will never go out of business.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Today the Empire Limestone Quarry near the southern Indiana town of Bedford is eerily quiet.   Through most of the 20th century, however, it was one of the busiest industrial centers in the Midwest.   Expert stonecutters removed hundreds of thousands of tons of Salem limestone, which is widely regarded as the finest limestone on… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3994,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[804],"class_list":["post-3993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-restoration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3993"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3997,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions\/3997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}