Make thee an ark of gopher wood. (Genesis 6:14)
One night in March 2010, God woke me in the middle of the night. He gave me a vision to build a scale model of Noah’s Ark. At the time, I was in the middle of working on my M.C.Ed degree in Biblical apologetics from the School of Biblical Apologetics (SOBA) at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). I needed a Master’s project or a thesis in order to fulfill the requirements for the degree. The Noah’s Ark model would more than fulfill that requirement.
As with Noah, God gave me a “big picture” vision of all the details that would need to go on the model. Part of that vision included donating the completed model to ICR. In the end, I was unable to complete the model in time for graduation, so I fulfilled my requirements by writing a thesis Images of Christ in Genesis. In there I include a chapter on “Christ in the Ark of Noah”. However, that did not squelch my determination to complete the model and make good on my promise. So the work continued a few hours every night after work and on weekends.
My garage, where I built the Ark, is not climate controlled, so in the summer temperatures were unbearably hot, and in the winter temperatures were numbingly cold. The ark was completed within a five-year timeframe. In that time, I spent 1379 hours to complete the task.