“There’s Tim Hortons!”
“There’s McDonalds!”
Yes, my children know them.
It was one day after piano lessons, and my girls began pointing out places they recognized. My oldest is on the brink of learning to read, so she felt especially proud.
But how do they recognize these fast food joints? By letters. Symbols. Markers along the way, if you will. They’ve been there before, we’ve mentioned the name, and they have remembered the symbols or letters that remind them of that place where they were fed.
These markers help us to remember where to go, or where not to go. What to remember.
Throughout the old testament especially, people would often set up stones as a memorial for a place of provision and to remind them of God’s faithfulness.
In Joshua 4:1-24 God leads Joshua to construct a memorial made of 12 stones – symbolizing the 12 tribes that God led out of the Jordan. In Joshua 3-4 the Ark of the Covenant was being carried forward by Levitical priests, as Joshua led the Israelites that Moses once did. As they approach the river Jordan, the Levitical priests merely stepped into the river, whose banks usually overflowed, stopped flowing and spread so that the entire nation of Israel passed over the river.
Once the people had passed over that thing that once stood as a barrier, the Lord instructed Joshua to have 12 men – symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel – grab a stone from the Jordan and carry it on their shoulder and lay it on the dry ground beside the river. They were instructed to tell their children for generations to come what the stones meant – deliverance, provision, faithfulness.
What made me reread? They were to take stones of remembrance from the very place that once stood as a barrier, potential threat, and what COULD have kept them from the promised land.
But this place was ACTUALLY God’s deliverance, protection and provision. It may not have seemed like it at the time, but it was.
As I drove with my girls in our minivan that day, I pondered, “What are MY markers? What are my signs of God’s faithfulness?”
We often want to resurrect the good – the joys and ways God superseded what we imagined. But what about the hard seasons? The “Jordan rivers” that He stopped flowing for us out of protection for us? I thought about the relationships that didn’t work out, how terrible some things could have gone, and how I struggled in my dating life to feel safe and seen.
And yet God parted the Jordan of dating for me and gave me my husband. A man I feel safe and loved and seen by.
Perhaps “my Jordan” – what felt really hard at the time – was actually God’s protection, provision and faithfulness. And rather than looking back on those stones of remembrance of struggle, perhaps those stones of my memories need to mean something new.
Protection. God’s best. God’s Father heart chasing after me to give me good gifts, not withhold.
Perhaps the things we remember, even the tough memories, need to have new meaning. Perhaps we need to lift up those stones of experiences and see them in a new light, so that the generations to come can look on our stories and see God’s faithfulness, rather than our struggle.
Because it seems, that God works His best glory in what we see as struggle.
