The Words of the Stone

Almost 1 year ago, I was on my first trip to Israel.

After hiking through the deserts and the wilderness of the Negev and the Dead Sea region and after walking in the steps of Jesus and his disciples around Galilee for 11 days, we finally arrived in Jerusalem late one afternoon. We made our way through the Damascus Gate and the bustling marketplaces of the Muslim quarter, and then we crossed over into the Jewish Quarter and emerged in a square facing the Western Wall—the base of the Temple Mount. 

Notes filling the cracks of the Western Wall in Jerusalem

For centuries, God's people have placed written notes or prayers into the cracks of the wall, and today well over 1 million notes per year make their way into those crevices. As individuals, we can speak or pray to God anytime or anywhere, but there is something powerful about the visual reminder of one's words joining with those of so many others who have come before—not to mention the tangible experience of placing your hands on the stones that so many hands have worn smooth in supplication.

But then again, the people of Israel know a longstanding connection between stone and faith. 

In the days of the Old Testament, the Lord commanded the Israelites to set up stones from the bed of the Jordan River as a reminder of bringing them safely to the Promised Land. The Hebrew word for those stones is massevot, and the idea was that as children would walk past the stones with their parents they would ask, "What happened here?" Those moments would invite a recounting of God's faithfulness that would, in turn, inform the faith of those who heard. Eventually, the word for the stones became synonymous with the question they invoked—much in the way that Xerox means to make a photocopy instead of just serving as the brand name of a machine. 

Massevot? 

What happened here?

In the New Testament, Peter takes this practice a step further when he tells the people of the early church that they are Living Stones and that their lives are meant to invoke the same question. What happened here? Why did you behave that way? Those questions become chances to recount the stories of God and His faithfulness anew.

Our stone—standing in the middle of Main Street
at Holland Christian High School Today

The past twelve months have been incredibly trying for Holland Christian Schools, where I serve as the superintendent. They have been full of grief and mourning based on the loss of three students and two staff members. Our beloved friends and colleagues have tackled health issues and battled against cancer. We've asked people to step outside their comfort zones on a great many fronts, and that's never easy.

So today, as we closed out the year with our staff, we took some time to give collective voice to our prayers, our wrestlings, and our praise. We took time to talk to God and each other about the support we've been thankful for and the ways we've seen the Lord's Kingdom expand amidst and even because of the difficulties we faced.

And then we wrote down those prayers and shoved them in our own hybrid version of the Western Wall and a massevot. 

It was personal.
It was physical.
And it was powerful.

As we depart from this school year and go into the summer . . . and as we look ahead to the future, it is my prayer that the words of the stone will be on our lips and in our hands and feet—that we will be ready to share about why we live the way we do, ready to demonstrate God's love and the ways of His Kingdom to others. I'm incredibly blessed to serve with a group of people who dedicate their lives to bringing about flourishing and Shalom out of Chaos, sin, and pain. 

We have a collective story to tell, and the words of the stone point to the life that is truly life.

A Sisyphean Task

I love legos.

I loved them as a kid, and over the last few years, I've rediscovered my enthusiasm for the interlocking building blocks with seemingly limitless possibilities for projects. Anyone who visits my office will see a collection of some of my creations on the shelves behind my desks. 

Legos are a nice diversion from some of the stress of work, but I also find that building a set helps me think through problems carefully and methodically, sometimes coming to a solution I wouldn't have considered otherwise. The more lego sets I build, the more interested I am in trying more complex assemblies and free-form ideas. 

Enter Sisyphus.

I just completed a mechanical Sisyphus sculpture that's not really an official lego set. You have to scour the internet for parts before putting together this great design by Jason at JK Brickworks.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and first king of Corinth. He was savage and vicious, but also crafty and cagey. He tricked and angered the gods in a variety of ways so that when they finally brought him to the underworld, he was given a truly cruel punishment. He was sentenced to push a massive boulder up a hill so as to take every ounce of effort he had in his body. As soon as it was at the top, the boulder would roll back down, and Sisyphus would have to start all over. 

Like that, for all eternity.

That story gives way to the term, "a Sisyphean task," which refers to any undertaking that is arduous and seemingly never ending.

So. 

Without going into details, I've had a challenging couple of weeks—the kind that really test your patience and perseverance. The kind where the right course of action may be easy to identify but incredibly hard to carry out. The kind that stir up all the wrong emotions and attitudes, even when you know what the correct ones should be.

We are commanded by God to do incredibly non-instinctive things that take all of our human notions of self-interest and self-preservation and turn them upside down. 

Because that's how the Kingdom comes. 

Turn the other cheek. 
Forgive seventy times seven. 
Carry your oppressor's gear for two miles if he asks you to carry it for one mile. 
Love your enemies. 
Pray for those who persecute you. 
And the list goes on and on.

When I was a kid, I used to think that the disciples must have been pretty dumb. It seemed they could never understand what Jesus was telling them or how he was instructing them to live. I thought, "boy, if I was alive back then, I would have just done what he wants them to do!" And then, on our trip to Israel this summer I had an epiphany—that it probably wasn't that the disciples didn't understand Jesus' stories or metaphors; it's that what he's asking is so hard.

This is why the prosperity gospel is so troublesome in my opinion. It seems painfully obvious that the clear promise of Christ is that if we truly follow him and reject our basest, earthly desires, we can be assured of hardship. Our hope comes from knowing that we have the Holy Spirit with us as our Counselor, and God has proven time and time again that he will always give his people "just enough" to make it through the Chaos they are facing. It's why a common prayer for the Hebrews was to give them feet for the path, rather than to make the path smooth and easy.

Galatians 6:9 says, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." I have been spending a lot of time in Galatians 5 and 6 lately, and I'm blown away by how much I see Paul's words speaking into my situation and calling me to a higher model of interaction with others. 

In these chapters, love and humility reign, even when we're tasked with calling out each other's faults. We see the list of the Fruit of the Spirit, and we're reminded to "put off the acts of the flesh." To our English ears, "of the flesh" prompts sexual connotations almost immediately, but included on that same list are hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy.

When I'm hurting, it's really tempting to start in with those acts of the flesh to recapture personal power or control over the situation. 

But I'm pretty sure that's not what dying to self is about.

It's not what the way of Christ is about.

So it shouldn't be what I'm about.

Lord, help me treat my brothers and sisters with respect as fellow image-bearers of God. Give me the ears to listen with empathy. Give me words clothed in humility to express my thoughts. And through it all, may you be put on display for the world to see.

Let us not become weary in doing good.

A Sisyphean task, to be sure, but it's how the Kingdom comes.