Thanksgiving: Why 'Every Stone Precious'?

At Thanksgiving we pause to focus on the things for which we are grateful.  The blessings. The good things in life.  Often it is easy to see the hand of God in our lives and count the blessings we have been given.  But there are always those nagging items that we wish we hadn’t been dealt.  Are we thankful for those things? 

When we brainstormed titles for our blog, I had in my mind a line from a poem by Stanley Kunitz: “every stone on the road precious to me.”  The poem was part of the English 30 distance education course that I’ve been marking for the past few years, and I’ve marked hundreds of assignments on those lines.

 We tried to come up with aviation-related titles for the blog, mostly composed of bad puns: “The Plane Truth”, “Planely Speaking”, and so on.  Tim vetoed these and so – in the absence of further creativity – we were left with “Every Stone Precious”. 

If life were a cobblestone street, each stone would be an event, a person, or an experience that – for better or worse – has shaped me.  As I look back through my life, there are some stones for which I am immediately grateful.  There are others that, given the choice, I would not have chosen to include.  An illness.  A loss. A delay. A regret. 

On further reflection, it is often those unchosen stones that have taught me the most about myself and about faith.  They remind me of my inadequacy and my inability to control people and circumstances (don’t we all need that reminder once in a while!).  When I’m forced outside of my own abilities, I have nowhere to go but God.  I am forced to focus on the eternal as the only hope in light of my present experiences.  And yet, despite how I see God work in hard times, I am quick to forget when comfort returns.

In Scripture, stones are often used as a visual reminder of “God moments”.  Jacob sets up the stone that was his pillow as a reminder of when God visited him. In the book of Joshua, God provides Israel with a powerful sign that he is with them: he stops the flow of the Jordan River – during the flood season, no less – and allows them to walk across on dry land.  As they cross the river bed, the children of Israel choose twelves stones from the middle of the river which they then set up as a reminder of God’s powerful provision.  Joshua tells the people:

“In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over.  He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God.”    (Joshua 4:21-24)

Joshua reminds the people not only of God’s provision at the Jordan but also at the Red Sea before that. Looking back on the milestones, the blessings, and the “God-moments” gives me strength to continue on with what I have before me in life.  Each stone on the road is precious to me, not necessarily for the experience that it represents, but for the impact that it has had on my faith and perspective.  At Thanksgiving, I don’t have to be thankful for the hurt in my life, but I can thank God for his faithfulness through it and for the ways that I’ve seen him provide.  When I share those experiences, they demonstrate God’s provision to others as well.

This blog is a place to record the God-stories that we will experience as we move overseas and as Tim flies for Mission Aviation Fellowship.  Although we look forward to the adventure and the opportunity to serve the people of Papua New Guinea, we are well aware that there will be rough spots ahead on our road.  We hope you’ll join us as we experience how God will strengthen and provide even in the tight spots.