I didn’t come to this through theology.
I came to it by tracing the architecture of leadership — face, frame, foundation.
But the more I studied those blueprints, the more I realized:
leadership isn’t the only thing with an architecture.
Years ago, an IT department I worked with had a saying:
“We don’t have time to do it right, but we have time to do it again.”
At first, I thought it was just a clever way to describe incompetence.
But later, the spirit of that phrase revealed itself:
an architecture that allowed showing progress without progression.
The system was built to value motion over meaning, activity over reflection.
And that’s when it hit me —
I was living inside walls I didn’t even see.
Family has its own architecture.
The roles, loyalties, and rules were built long before I could choose.
I inherited not just a name, but a structure I had to live within.
Faith has an architecture too.
Not belief itself — belief is longing.
But the way we house that longing: temples, scriptures, doctrines, rituals.
I didn’t build those walls, but I lived inside them, mistaking them for the whole sky.
Culture carries its own beams and doorways as well —
expectations, myths, unspoken laws that guide us without asking.
And the more I looked, the more I noticed others.
The economy has an architecture — scaffolding that decides what we chase, what we trade away, what we call success.
Technology has one too — algorithms quietly shaping what we notice and what we forget, even before we choose.
Most of the time, we don’t see the walls.
They only reveal themselves when they crack.
And when they do, longing shows itself —
the ache that predates every structure,
the hunger no architecture can fully contain.
That’s when I began to see:
We don’t just live inside architectures.
We build them.
And then we confuse them for life itself.
The real work isn’t to escape the walls, or to worship them.
It’s to remember the life they were built to hold.
You are living inside architectures you did not build.
And you are building architectures you do not see.
Look closely.
If you want to follow this thread further — to see how humanity built its greatest architecture of all — you can keep reading: God as Our Greatest Architecture.