The Ordinary Stone

6/9/13

The Ordinary Stone

My morning walk was peaceful.  I love the quiet weekend mornings with our dog.  I am free to think things through in ways that I cannot when I am inside.

The Lord speaks to me anytime, anywhere, but I feel more open and undistracted when I am able to see the sky and hear the birds.   Well, not really undistracted, I find my thought meander from thing to thing, but at an easier pace than at other times.  Perhaps this is why I hear better when I am outside.

And not just with my physical ears, but maybe because I am awe of my surroundings, I am able to be inspired with answers to questions that I really had not thought to ask yet.

This time, while thinking about a conversation with a friend, I was trying to find a way to define how the dark and painful things from our past actually make us uniquely qualified to step into the huge thing that He intended for us to do before creation. 

And there it was, just sitting on the ground in the dirt, like an ordinary stone.  In fact it was an ordinary stone.  But it was also so much more.

 

I’d seen it out of the corner of my eye as I passed it.  Then, for some reason, I was pulled back, compelled to pick it up and carry it home in my pocket.  What caused me to do this?  Whose voice was I hearing?  My own – telling me that there would be at least one good story there; or did the stone cry out to the Lord, so He would cause me to turn around and bring it home with me?

In any case, I have it now.  I rinsed off most of the dirt and placed it on my dresser, so I must choose to look at it or not.

 There is a home truth for me right there.  How many things do I see as I pass them, or let them pass me, without stopping to acknowledge them?  Words unsaid, a needed touch or hug not given.  That moment with God that I postpone may be the call to pray for someone I cannot see, but desperately needs me to pray intentionally for them right now.  This may explain some of the emptiness that comes over me at times.  My unsaid prayers may explain the loss of the joy I could have felt in that lost conversation with the Lord.

This particular stone is about the size of a regular marshmallow.  One side is fairly smooth and the other is rough and uneven, obviously broken sometime in the past.  But the edges are not sharp, so perhaps the break was not too painful; or was so long ago that the jagged edges have been softened over time.

The thing that caught my eye was the size.  It was a bit larger than most of the others and was white, with black marbling.  Not absolute black, but clearly defined in the moment my eyes turned the object into a thought.  We had just gone through a series of teachings about, “One Shade of Black”, so this may have been a continuation or expansion of that lesson.

The truth is the truth.  And sin is sin.  Yet, I was given a picture of myself in that stone.  Mostly “good”, or at least heading in that direction; but still the sum of the things in myself that need to submit and surrender to the Lord.  A statement that I have made countless times, and still falling short, reaching back, slipping and sliding along that downard slope whenever I try to take charge of myself.

Then, I heard the Sweet, Soothing Voice Within.  The Voice that reminds me that He has already forgiven my past every time I asked Him.  The marbling is my testimony, not my shame.  My rough and bumpy parts are the lessons that I can share with those He places in my path.  I do not need to bury, hide or deny things I have done, or what has been done to me.

I do not need to memorize fighting words from scripture to corner folks and wrestle them into submission. I can speak boldly with kindness and generosity as I share the reasons for my joy and the work that the Lord has done and is still doing in me.   Logic is the world’s way of thinking.  Faith can grow when the world sees me forgiving, loving and trusting the Lord – every day.

We are all living “between a rock and a hard place”.  But that ordinary stone is showing me that the hard place is here and now.  The hard place is life.

 

The ordinary stone is me.  And the Rock is salvation.   

“When hard pressed, I cried to the Lord;  He brought me into a spacious place.  The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” Psalm 118:4-6

Written by

Lynda Kinnard