29 Oct WRITTEN IN STONE

It is fascinating to me that God chose to write the ten commandments on a couple of big rocks. He could’ve done it so many others ways, why rock? Why not write them permanently in the sky or have in grafted into the skin of all human beings? I feel like the stone tablet idea failed the litmus test after the first draft broke into pieces on the slopes of Mt. Sinai. The more I think about it, I’ve started to realize that it was more for us than the Father.

Humans have a romantic relationship with the permanency of stones. We marvel at mountains and we travel to Stonehenge. We like ‘dem big rocks.

There was a feeling of permanency and importance to the ten commandments, especially because they were written in stone. It meant they were supposed to last and supposed to be remembered and practiced. As far as the people of Israel were concerned, this was forever.

I think of this story as a picture into the past being captured in a moment of time. God marking down what was and what was to be for His people. But as i’ve spent the last few months in Grenoble, France, I feel like the Lord has begun to teach me something new in regards to the things He says and has said.

There are things that God has spoken, has set in stone, that don’t just represent my past or even my present, but are things to come in the future. Promises and plans that He has recorded and yet I have still to walk in them.

20 years ago I would’ve never imagined being here, at age 35, with a wife and three children. I couldn’t have known or seen the work that God was doing. Much like the Israelite’s, I could have never grasped the greater work that God was doing in the midst of what seemed like a mundane existence. But here we are.

All cards on the table, being here has been somewhat of an identity crisis. Who am I? What am I good at and does that even matter anymore? Will I really be able to learn the language? And most of all, did God really bring me here? Vanessa and I have wrestled with these questions on and off since our arrival and it has not been an easy journey.

I recently spoke with a great friend of mine, Henry Smith, a missionary to Ecuador, and he encouraged me with a funny story about the difference between visiting a beautiful foreign country and living in a beautiful foreign country. Without telling you the story I’ll just say it turns out to be harder to live than visit.

Recently I have felt like God has been asking me to focus. Focus in on him, yes, but mostly discard anything that is pointless and distracting. Sports, media, games on my phone, those things were the first to go. But as I was walking home from a coffee shop where I had spent a few hours working I felt like God asked me to take my headphones out and just walk quietly home. I know, not a big deal, but I felt like that was what the Spirit was asking me to do. So I did.

The coffee shop I frequently visit, La Cafteuse, is on the street that our apartment is on and only takes me 5 minutes to walk to. As I got closer to my apartment, only a few doors from my entrance, I came across my name carved into the sidewalk next to a cross that was also carved in the concrete.

I stopped in my tracks. It was my name next to a cross. It was a rocks throw from my new apartment that we had just picked out in another country.

It was MY name.

You can take life in one of two ways. You can believe that this moment is a silly and cute coincidence and move on, or you can receive it as a gift from the Father. I have chosen, and it has changed my life, to receive such moments as the work of a living God. At some point, someone named Jordan carved his name into wet concrete near my future apartment. In addition to that, they carved a cross. There are things that God is doing now, that I just cannot see. Somewhere on the timeline of my life, He is writing things in stone. They are promises I’ve yet to discover and haven’t begun to remember yet, and they are moments that will shape my life. Somewhere in my past I have experienced these stone moments and somewhere in my near future God is writing another.

Some of the things God has done for me I’ve squandered and shattered on the Sinai’s of my life, but in His grace, He’s provided redemption and lead me into another moment with Him.

I cannot tell you all that I felt when I read my name carved onto my sidewalk, but one thing I realized is that I have a good Father who is working through my past, leading in my present, and planning for my future.

Whether here or there, God is at work and not hiding.