This is our last Friday to visit in the month of July and here in the Midwest we are having a rare and delightful summer day.
I sat out on our back patio with coffee and books this morning, enjoying a cooler breeze, no humidity and birds lightly chirping off in the trees. It was all I could do to pull myself back into the house and begin the process of getting ready for the day.
Our summer has been full of several get-togethers with our entire family (unheard of in recent years!), many ball games and outings shared with those four small people who are growing up waaaay too fast.
We have some more fun things planned in the next few weeks and my phone is overloaded with even more photos that I need to clear out to make room for the adventures that remain.
Photos are the current way we remember people and events.
As we pull them up to show someone we run into or scroll through them as we have some down time or share them with our family who were unable to attend some gathering, we tell stories about where we have been and what we have done.
This morning I read about a different kind of remembering.
In Joshua 4, as the people of Israel passed through the Jordan River into the land of promise following 40 years of desert trekking, Joshua commissions one man from each tribe to pick up a stone from the river bed.
The priests had stepped into a flowing river moments before and the waters had stopped, thus baring a dry path for the people to cross through.
Only two men in the mix would have been alive to see the first miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, two men who had once entered this land and proclaimed it to be good and yet had to wait such a long time for this moment.
After everyone had passed safely through, Joshua watches one man from each of the twelve tribes hoist a large rock onto his shoulder and carry it across.
The men were to take them into their tent that night.
The next day Joshua had them put them into a stack alongside the river Jordan and then he told them they were a memorial of what had happened here.
He told them that their children would ask about these stones piled up and they would be a reminder of what God had done.
We understand the value of repeating stories until the hearer owns the memory as much as we who lived through something.
I remember family stories that were recounted so many times, i actually feel like they are my stories even though I wasn’t alive for some of them.
I could tell you about the one and only time my mom and aunt could remember their dad losing his temper and I own that story even though my grandpa passed years before I was born.
Or the time my own dad cut through a pumpkin and scratched a coffee table of my mom’s even though I never even saw the injured coffee table because it was long gone before I joined the family.
Stories, pictures, reminders of God’s faithfulness to us are important and they need to be shared.
What rocks of remembrance have you gathered from the places God has made clear for you to pass through?
Please share your stories of deliverance.
The world is in great need to know there is a God who saves <3
