The Quiet Gospel of Monday
On finding grace in the ordinary start of a week.
When the people of Israel crossed the Jordan into the promised land, Joshua told twelve of them to reach down into the riverbed and pick up a stone. One for each tribe. The stones were not for building. They were for remembering.
In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord.
Memory, it turns out, is a spiritual discipline. The brain is a forgetting machine. Grace, left unmarked, slides downstream with everything else. So we pick up stones. We name what God has done. We tell our children.
“Faith is not the absence of forgetting. Faith is the practice of remembering on purpose.”
Tonight, before you sleep, take one stone out of your own river. Just one. A small mercy from the last week. A prayer that was answered. A friend who showed up. Hold it in your hand long enough to know its weight, then set it on the shore of your life where you will see it again tomorrow.
About the Author
David J. Van Wormer
Retired pastor and ten-year chaplain in hospital, psychiatric, and hospice settings. Writing from the river's edge in Eugene, Oregon.
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