Bits for Sunday, March 2, 2008

When you hear a great idea, you’re supposed to pass it on, right?

Well, several months ago, this seed of an idea was planted in my mind and is just too good to not share…so I’m sharing it today. I’m sure it’s not an original idea, but I suppose if I made it through this much of life without hearing of it until recently, surely someone else is the same way. So for those of you who already thought of this…come back next week, and I’ll try to come up with something original.

Last fall I participated in one of Beth Moore’s Bible studies. Not directly live and in person with her, you understand, but one of her video studies. A church in town offered her Believing God study, and since last year’s theme for my personal Bible study was faith…it seemed appropriate to learn more. And Beth is a very wise and grounded teacher, in my opinion, so I was excited to learn from her.

One week she taught from Joshua 4 – part of the account of the Israelites finally crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land. Verses 5b-7 say, “Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you , ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.” To illustrate her point that week, Beth had surrounded her teaching area with huge rocks…twelve of them.

In our small group discussion later, our leader shared this idea…and I loved it so much that I adapted it a bit and have added it to my covenant list for this next decade.

My small group leader is a mother of two girls – and while I am not sure of their ages, they’re not too terribly old. She decided to start teaching them early about the relevance of God in their day to day lives. Of course she wants them to be well-grounded in the accounts told in Scripture, but she also wants them to be aware that God did not stop being personally involved in people’s lives after Revelation was written.

So she purchased some rocks at the craft store (the kind you use in decorating) and each time the girls recognize God’s answer to a prayer they’ve prayed, they write the date on one of the rocks and put it in a jar. As they watch that jar fill up with rocks, they’ll be reminded of times when God was actively involved in their lives.

Well, you know me…I love tangible learning methods. So I borrowed (stole?) her idea and added to it the extra step of journaling…because everything in my life involves journaling. How is it that I have avoided carpal tunnel up to this point?

The covenant I made with God is that over the course of the next ten years, I want to keep track of even some of the ways He works in my life. I’m aware that He’s more involved than even I recognize on a daily basis. But I want to capture those moments that need to be kept for my own remembrance as well as the preservation of my spiritual journey for my kids…if I ever have kids.

When I was little, I used to read the Grandma’s Attic books…anybody remember those? One of the stories was about Grandma’s button jar and how the storyteller would sit down beside her grandmother, pull out at button, hand it to her, and then wait to hear the story of that button…because every button had a story. Well, I may not have a jar of buttons, but I do have a jar of stones…and when someone pulls out a rock and hands it to me and says “What does this mean?” I want to be able to go to the journal, find the story and share how God worked in my life in such a powerful way that I wanted to remember it always.