A lesson in the story of the Sydney Opera House

  

                              

   Our tour of Australia wound to a close with four days in Sydney. The plan was to spend Saturday seeing the beautiful city, exploring the famous Opera House perched on the edge of the Sydney Harbor and also taking a cruise around the harbor in the evening.

   Sunday was an optional excursion to the nearby Blue Mountains and the Featherdale Wildlife Park where we would finally see some koala bears. Our fellow travelers would be departing on Monday morning, most continuing on to New Zealand and Fiji and a few heading back to the US, while Al and I would stay for two more days so that we could link up with my cousin and his family who live in the suburbs of the city.

   That Saturday turned out to be crammed full of activities from early in the morning to nearly midnight. A bus tour around the harbor in the morning gave us many wonderful views of the Opera House as well as cliffs, beaches and the downtown area too. We even visited an impressive exhibit of fire opal mined in Australia. There were several opalized fossil specimens, including the skeleton of a small Plesiosaur, a “swimming reptile.” One large room was filled with cases of lovely jewelry made from the opals for purchase.

    After lunch, our group was taken backstage through the Sydney Opera House which actually has two sections, one housing a large concert hall and the other a smaller hall, plus a warehouse for stage props and many other rooms. We also watched an excellent video presentation of its history. The story was fascinating, but also kind of sad.

     In 1955, the Prime Minister of New South Wales announced a world-wide competition to find the right design for a new opera house. Architects from more than twenty countries submitted proposals. Two years later, the imaginative sketch of a series of concave shells drawn by a Danish architect, Jorn Utzon, was chosen after originally being rejected.

     Construction commenced in 1959 before the final plans had even been finished. Utzon and his team labored for seven years before they figured out how to actually construct the shells which formed the outer structure of the two halls. With the help of a computer program, they discovered that different sections of a sphere could be cut out and reassembled to create the unique design. There were many other setbacks and problems, with the expenses adding up as the years dragged on.

    With a change in government that resulted in a cut to the funding of the opera house, Utzon resigned in the mid 1960’s and returned to Denmark, never to go back to Sydney. An Australian architect, Peter Hall, finished the project in 1973, ten years later than the projected date and costing many times more than the original seven million dollar estimate. Today it is used for concerts, operas, conventions, ballet and dance performances and has become world renown for its unique architecture.

    The story of the opera house was a modern day example of Jesus’ teaching that those who want to follow him need to carefully consider the cost first. He calls his followers to give up control of their lives, humble themselves and daily surrender to God’s will, important things to consider before making such a huge decision. May we be willing to consider the cost, pay the price and commit ourselves to following Jesus to the end. He did this for us!

     “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’”  Luke 14:28-30 NIV