Me, the Stone

The life of faith, for me, often feels like a skipping-stone.  You sling it out into the river, and it touches for only the briefest of moments before springing, arching back into the air, drifting, drifting, until it skips again.

There are moments, crisp, poignant, clear moments, when all I know is God.  When every bit of my experience is consumed in the present, the Word breaking in harshly, as through glass.  All pretense is shattered, and I respond reflexively.

Recent moments like that:

• Reading Ezekiel, and recognizing the shame that accompanies so great a salvation, and almost being brought to tears. A sharp, fast skip.
• Listening to the story of a coworker who shares of the early death of a sister in an automobile accident years ago.  Abrupt, and melting my awareness into a sweet, deep sadness, with a yearning for redemption.
• Realizing, in working through conflict with Lizzy, that God has committed to me so deeply as to negate the danger of my failures, past and present, and future.  A slow skip, steadily dawning, deepening, before fading away again.

Often these moments are the very things I write about here on the blog.  Perhaps my writing is the ripple produced at each brief contact.  I hope my ripples go still further, that these moments drive life and hope and peace into the world around me.

Yet, so much more of my life, day-to-day, resembles the drifting of the stone through the air.  There is a loss of gravity, of pressure.  The weightiness of life, the meaning of each moment fades away like the coffee shop music playlist- you never know that the album has ended, until it's been silent long enough to make us all feel awkward.

And so I live, often with an awkward, uncomfortable sense that this is not one of those moments.  I do not perceive contact with anything greater than myself.  I see no ripples, feel no pressure, lack proper emotion. It can be debilitating, the gaps, the dry, empty air between bits of water.  And, should I dwell on my present experience (or lack thereof), I am prone to despair, and frustration, and bitterness.

But if I choose to remember, if I look back at all the moments in which I have grazed the surface of the water, the moments when all has been compressed into certainty and clarity and purpose and hope, often I find the courage to continue.

Israel is repeatedly told to remember.  Half of the Old Testament is plagiarized, I'm confident, repeating what has already been said.  How many times must the tale of Abraham the patriarch be retold?  Or the story of Moses and the Exodus?  Must we really hear again of the conquest of the promised land, and the establishment of Israel?

Yes.  We must hear it again.  Because we are a forgetful people, quick to define ourselves by our present circumstance and not by our roots, our narratives, our stories; our skips.

Man was created in the image of an eternal God, and somehow our minds were not meant to merely consider the present.  We are to hope in the future, indeed, and also to remember the past.  Because in the past we often see most clearly the hand of God, and the Figure of redemption being indwelt within us.

And I hope, as I grow older, that the skips will become more frequent, as a stone slows near the end of it's path.  And I do look, with eager anticipation, towards the moment the stone sinks.  What a glorious day that will be.

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Practically, I have a stack of flashcards by my bed.  When something occurs that I perceive to be His hand, I write it down.  I have dozens of healings, provisions, prophecies, words, encouragements, scriptures- the stack is roughly an inch and a half thick, and growing.  I recommend something like it for you: an Ebenezer, a system of remembrance.  The stack has been crucial, particularly on those nights I've gone to bed laden with doubt or awoken in heavy anxiety.  I also blog, to meditate on the stories of God.  And I read scripture.  Re-placing myself in the story of redemption (global and personal)- it's a wonderful means of grace.