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.