Gathering Stones

My daughter, Greta, has a rock-collecting container. It looks like a miniature tackle box but instead of lures and hooks it is filled with rocks. To my eye, Greta' rock container holds a hundred similar stones. To Greta's eye, it holds treasure - not in the bejewelled, golden kind, but the treasure of memories. Greta gathers stones and the visible reminder of the shape and the color of the stone brings back a moment in life.

A few years ago, my family on a vacation. We decided that between my internship year and my last year of seminary that we would see as much of the North America as humanly possible. So, in a six week journey, we put seven thousand miles on the car (and the pop-up camper). Traveling from Iowa across to the West Coast, we visited incredible sites like Custer State Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite, Redwoods. We trekked up the coast through Oregon and Washington and finished by traveling from the Canadian Rockies to Lake Superior. All in all, it was an experience that we can't ever replicate not just because of the length of time (or length of journey for that fact) but because life is never the same. The girls were six, four and three and deep into experiencing the world one rock at a time.

Instead of being awed by the magnificent canyons or massive trees, the girls were always on the lookout for things that they could climb whether park benches, trees or rock piles. As Christine and I 'oohed' and 'aahed' over the magnificence of the created world, Elsa, Josephine and Greta had their eyes glued to the horizon for the next rock pile. So, every few hours we would have to stop and stretch while the girls fulfilled their inner spirit of mountaineering.

As I watched the girls do this, though, what I began to notice was that after each moment of rock climbing, Greta was picking up a rock and putting it in her pocket. We watched the pockets of her jeanshorts bulge like the cheeks of a chipmunk carrying seeds. By the end of the day she probably weighed and extra five pounds.

"What are you carrying in your pockets, Greta?"
"Nothing." Three-year-old logic is quite different than adult logic. Well, maybe not.
"It looks like you've got something in your pockets."
It's funny; she actually had to look at her pockets to see if something was in them.
"I wanted to take rocks."
"Can I see them," I asked.

You could see the light in her eyes. She wanted to share those things that she had picked up along the way. Pulling out handful after handful of pebbles, stones, pieces of rock not much bigger than a sand particle. Her little hands were like shovels digging into the earth; some of the rocks tumbled to the ground but she kept her eyes on them making sure not to lose any of them.

To my untrained eye all of the rocks looked basically the same. Smoothed by erosion and time, these gray stones, some of them with a white stripe or a distinctive crevice, looked basically identical.

"Greta," I said poking my way through the mound, "Why are you carrying all of these rocks around. They look all look the same."

Greta moved in between myself and the pile assuming I was about ready sweep them from the table. Protecting them like a mother lioness she looked up at me and said, "Daddy, you're so silly. These are my memories from my walk today." Then, for an agonizing fifteen minutes, Greta recounted every climbing episode that she'd encountered. One rock that was next to the picnic table. Another one from the place where we saw a bear in the distance. She pointed to a smooth rock that she actually tripped over. All of them were a reminder of what she had just experienced. She had gathered up the rocks to remind her of where she had been.

I have written about this in the past, but the same thing happened with the Israelites crossing the Jordan River. God tells Joshua that the priests must gather rocks with them and pile them up on the shore as a visible reminder of where they had just been. The rocks symbolized the difficulties of the journey but also the hope of the future. They piled the rocks on shore and in the middle of the Jordan River. In the midst of where the water just was they piled another set of rocks to remind themselves that God had spared them from death.

What about the stone rolled from the tomb? What about gravestones? These rocks are reminders of memories along the journey but they are also promises of hope for a future. Plans to prosper and not to harm. The stone rolled from the tomb leads to an awareness of the gaping hole that death brings but its emptiness leads us to hope - hope which does not disappoint. Hope which leads to faith and new life. This stone we carry with us - it rolls with us (a rolling stone) like the stone that Paul says rolled with the Israelites through the desert to provide water at a moments notice. (1 Corinthians 10:3,4)

So I asked Greta what she was going to do with her stone memories. She smiled. "I'm going to keep the best ones and throw the rest in the river." With that she picked up her rocks, put them back in her pockets and made her way to the stream where one by one, with great relish, she plinked and plunked the rocks in different parts of the fast flowing stream. With each toss she recounted what she was doing when she found the rock, but at the same time, without even knowing it, she was making room for more 'stone memories' in her pockets.

That was a good object lesson for me. There are so many 'memory stones' that I hold onto that limit my ability to move on. I become weighed down by the oppressive memories of the journey that sometimes I forget to cast them into the river, to let them roll on their merry way so that I can fill my own life journey with the things that God has planned for me/us/we/the world.

What memory stones will you keep and which ones will you cast into the river? Where will you go to gather stones and where will you toss them.

Ecclesiastes 5:5a a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together.