Leave it to a Civil Engineer to title a blog about gravel properties, but please don’t leave me yet. I bring this topic up because it has reminded me of the gospel, and of love. Now I guess you are thinking I’m nuts. That’s alright – I get that sometimes.

The background to my story is the filling of some potholes I was working on this afternoon on my driveway. We picked up a material that is called road base and it has little stones in it, medium stones in it, and some larger stones. A little bit of sand and a touch of clay, and abra cadabra, – fill for a pothole.

As I was shoveling the material out of the truck, my wife would level it out with a rake, and as she was leveling, she asked me why we didn’t use sand for the holes since we have so much available on site. I had to reach back to my schooling, but I described sand as a uniformly graded material very much like marbles, and any effort to pile marbles usually results in the marbles rolling away from each other. Hence the footprint in the sand syndrome!

The material we picked up was a non-uniformly graded base material with interlocking structures. The differing sizes find their place amongst the other stones, and the result is that after a bit of packing, the stones fill up the voids, allowing for greater bearing capacity for the road bed.

After all my rambling on about stones, I eventually looked up and saw that my wife was sincerely looking to understand something that was a part of my life. Please understand that my wife is an awesome lady, a sensitive loving person that cares for sick puppies, loves her garden, finds enjoyment in cleaning her home, and loves to dress up to go out. She is, in my opinion, the perfect example of a Christian lady, but then I may be a bit biased!

In all of this, she entered into my world of logic and analysis, of design and structure, of numbers and schedules to try to understand the fundamentals of gravel. 

Who cares about gravel? 

That’s the point. Gravel is about as interesting as watching paint dry, even for an engineer, but she was sincerely involved in the conversation, trying to understand it for the sake of understanding. Maybe to try to understand me a bit better.

You know, there is another who has taken an interest in our world. He has come down to talk of farmers and pearls, fish and tax collectors, kings and beggars, prostitutes and lepers. He often asked questions to bring people into conversations.

As He is God Almighty, it is not as if He needed any knowledge, or direction or input, but He involved Himself with a motley gang of unknown men, and expressed His love to them in all the interactions He entered into. And I am sure that each interaction left a mark on the disciple or friend, and His attention to their lives became an anchor for their memory of Him.

I wonder if He chatted with one of them about non-uniformly graded base with interlocking granular structures? I think He would have made it very interesting!

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