Ebenezer

I am starting to collect stones. I only have two thus far so I don't really know if can use the word "collecting" properly here but still. I came home to a rock sitting on my closet shelf and one in the pocket of my bag. That seems to qualify as a "collection" to me.

The first rock I found myself after I convinced Dréa to put on her rain boots and romp the banks of Riley Creek with at Bluffton University in the spring of 2009. I needed them for a little friend devotional time we were having/a Sunday Evening Worship that I was speaking at. I stood up on the bridge and pointed as brave Dréa brought up the rocks I thought would work for an "Ebenezer." I found my rocks that my friends eventually wrote all over as part of remembering what God has done for us over the course of our final year at Bluffton. On the big one we used to Sunday Evening Worship, I wrote "Thus far the Lord has helped us" from that chapter in numbers where Moses sets up an Ebenezer as a reminder of how God helped the Israelites to bring them to where they were at day. I liked that a lot and after having a pretty rough time at Bluffton (on and off) and getting to the place where I could barely think of leaving, I thought it was fitting to set up our own. I am not sure what happened to those two stones, covered in different colors of Sharpies, maybe they ended up back in the Riley, which would maybe be fitting, but by the end of the year I still had a leftover, unused stone that Dréa had brought out of the creek. So as I was packing up my things one final time at Bluffton, I took the rock with me. When I got home, I wrote "Bluffton 09" on it and that verse, in a way to remember everything and everyone that God had blessed me with and by at Bluffton University. A pillar, so I wouldn't forget that my story is far from over.

That rock greeted me as I unpacked my suitcase over a year later, sitting on very visible place on my shelf.

The second rock came a few days before I found myself unpacking in my room in Asheville, North Carolina. We were still in Chicago, resting gently in the week that "buffer" our experience in our service locations and our "normal, everyday lives." And of course, I was struggling. Emotionally, I was all over place for several reason, but one of them was mourning the fact that my time in Chicago would be sort, that the days being a community of people who were in the exact same place I was were numbered – that I only had a limited amount of space before I was pushed back into a world, of saying hello and goodbye to my best friend in a short 12 hour period, the world of my grandpa's funeral, and the world of living with my parents again unsure of how to be a responsible adult when looking for a job that I might be interested seems to be impossible. And then Darrell gave us each an Ebenezer stone. They weren't river rocks this time, but colorful, polished rocks that would easily fit in your pockets.

My second Ebenezer is green and now sits near my Bluffton rock as a constant reminder to myself that "thus far the Lord has helped me."

On a very real level, I don't feel as if I have time to breath yet. So many things have happened since I've gotten back (and will continue to happen for awhile), that I haven't made real time to be or to try and sort out anything from this last year in Pietermaritzburg. But God has helped me thus far, and it would be utter nonsense if I believe this is the end of the journey. My story is far from over. And I will be dealing with this experience far after I stop posting things to this blog.

But in the meanwhile, (and after all this frantic traveling is over) I am going to pull up a chair and give time for my soul to catch up with me. I might use this blog as a way to try and figure out what that means, but if I don't, I will sign off now. Thank you to everyone who has helped me these past 10 months by reading my blog and carrying my burdens with me, laughing with me, and walking with me. I look back on this experience, and even though I am still not sure what I think about a lot of things, I do know that thus far the Lord has helped me and that God will continue to do just that for the rest of my life.