stacking stones

“When are we going to take a look at my planner,” Riley asks me, her voice stumbling along, like tripping feet.

I glance up just in time to see a tear slide off the bottom of her jaw and feel, suddenly, the wrenching grip of compassion. Immediately on my feet, I move toward her.

We have been talking about assigning priority to responsibility, she and I, that whole illustration about putting the big rocks in your life-jar first, and I can see now, she’s flat out stubbed a toe on a few of her rocks before gathering them up.  It’s like she’s holding the lot of them now, heavy in tired arms, frustrated because she can’t quite figure out which ones are big.  We can talk like this about a thing like responsibility without ever really getting around to the solid truth.

Because just this morning, before the sun rose, I had read an ancient bit of God’s instructions to His venturing people, my thumb meandering over the words, the page parchment-thin, the voice steady-clear and timeless.

When you have crossed the Jordan into the land the Lord your God is giving you, set up some large stones and coat them with plaster. Write on them all the words of this law when you have crossed over to enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, promised you. And when you have crossed the Jordan, set up these stones on Mount Ebal, as I command you today, and coat them with plaster. Build there an altar to the Lord your God, an altar of stones.

As I read, I could almost hear the grunting sound of human hefting, the solid thunk of stone on stone, could smell the grass, there on Mount Ebal, crushed beneath their pilgrim feet.  I imagined a humming scribe, half murmuring the words of the law aloud as he scrawled them, somehow, in vein-like lines over the plaster, the stones becoming pillar, altar, sign.

In the Bible, stacked stones memorialize the power and accomplishment of God rather than the work of human hands.  They impress the weight of holy glory into vulnerable mortal palms, and, when piled together, they build a visual memory of the truth.

This is what I most want Riley to know, more than any more efficient strategy for stacking, that the stones she carries—no matter the size—must first represent the presence and activity of God.  We should build pillars more than to-do lists, have stone-stacking parties and seal our large rocks together with the Words of God.  Before we get to planning, we should make memorial altars of joy, places where we, as living sacrifices, lay down and take our rest.

I hadn’t thought of it until this morning when I was sitting under that scripture, that I have a stone-stacking party every month with my sister Camille, Riley’s mom-in-love, sitting at a coffee shop table, where we haul up large stones testifying to the things God has done in the exceptional lives of our people, like stepping stones we’ve collected from beneath our feet on a Red Sea road.  We stack them into pillars of faith, remembering–always remembering, right out loud–as we prepare to take possession of more of God’s promises.

I hadn’t thought of it until this morning, how that kind of stacking can change how you see a stone.  I wondered, the question sprawling across a page in my journal:  What if, instead of filling a life-jar, I’m every day only building a testimony about God? 

I lift Riley’s planner from the counter now, running my thumb over a different set of words, her words, covering the paper, day after day after day for, I’m scanning now, months, like rainbow-colored skin.  She has written so hard, so diligently, another law, lists of things she’ll never manage to do, the words in columns like bars, written so hard as to rip the paper.  That paper, tissue of trees flourishing by water the way people thrive on God, has gone soft beneath the over-striving of her pen.

“Oh sweetheart,” I say, looking up, and another tear slides down her cheek, and all I really want to offer her right now is a rescue.  “It’s okay that you’re never going to be able to do all of this. You were never really meant to.”

I reach, and she leans into me the way she has since she was little-girl small, awkwardly bending her adult body forward now to flatten her ear against my chest, pressing it in right over my heart.

“I think, I think we need to start with the big rocks first,” I say, when she has stilled.

“What big rocks?”

I feel her tense, blinking lashes swiping against my shirt, and I smile, knowing her literal autistic mind has conjured actual stones, knowing she’s confused, wondering what-in-the-world I could mean.

“Well, that’s just a figure of speech,” I tell her, explaining.  “What I mean is, what if we start all this looking at your planner by remembering what God has done, before we think about His plans for you, your days?”

What if we start by stacking our memorial stones; what if we plaster them over with His words; what if we launch our plans at an altar, built on remembering?

“Okay,” she ventures, her voice tentative, her fingers twitching, pen-ready, against my shoulder.  “Well, God has just given me a job, and that’s amazing.”

“Yes, it is amazing”—that stone, wide and flat and strong at the bottom, glittering with light—“and?”

“And He brought Josh and me together.  God gave me Josh!”

Another stone.  Over this one she laughs, loud and rich and free, all grace.

“And?”

“And He’s always with me…always takes care of me…and…He made me great at remembering.”

And just like that, Riley leaning soft against me, still, listening safe to the beat of love, we get to building.