Cast Away and Gather

A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together

Ecclesiastes 3:5

(RSV)

I spent some time in Seattle on holiday once and as I was wandering around Pike Place market, I came across a craft stall that was selling etched stones. A table top storm beach of pebbles and words. Maybe because I was literally far from home, my subconscious led me to buy one with the word HOME engraved on the smooth, grey surface. Pocket sized but still not a sensible thing to buy on holiday. The ‘home stone’ travelled to Vancouver and across the Rocky Mountains with me before making its own small weighty contribution to excess baggage on the homeward journey.

Some years later, I came across more word pebbles in a local gift shop and this time, I bought one with the word JOY written on it. Again I didn’t have a special reason for choosing it. Perhaps I was feeling particularly joyful that day. It was the word I found most evocative and it joined the first stone on the hearth. There these two etched stones sit beside another stone, pocketed while walking on Murlough beach. This third stone I did choose deliberately. It was bright white and it was an immediate reminder of Revelation 2:17. I stencilled the Bible reference on the white stone roughly in black marker myself.

‘and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.’

A George MacDonald sermon entitled ‘The New Name’ sparked my imagination and opened up this verse in a lasting and meaningful way.

‘In brief, the giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man.’

‘his own idea of the man, that being whom he had thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought through the long process of creation that went to realise the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success – to say, “In thee also I am well pleased.”

To one day stand before God and receive our new name, to receive the full revelation of who we are as created by him is a phenomenal experience to look forward to and incorporates all three of these words.

Home,   Joy,  Revelation

Three words unintentionally brought together but a gathering that can be viewed as the representation of the solidity and weightiness of truth, the deep etching of God’s love in our lives and the immutability of the gospel. Words for these last days and also for future everlasting days. Now, we experience home, joy and revelation in part but one day in full.

In the process of His ongoing creation of me, I have stood on a beach with more stones in my hand. This time these stones represented things that were being cast away, things that I had held onto for far too long and needed to be thrown irretrievably into the depths of the sea. These dense weights within us exert a gravitational force that constantly pulls us inward. It is only the stronger, more powerful pull of Jesus that enables us to be free of those inward forces.

Two friends, who I suspect were somewhat bemused but to whom I am eternally grateful, read and prayed with me before I cast those stones as far as I could into the water. An unorthodox but cathartic experience which I can recommend.

Now almost one year later, I find myself gathering and collecting. Gathering more words. Words that have come across my path in the course of time from authors old and new. From a castaway beach experience to a new gathering.

These are the tidal like rhythms of Christian faith and life. Gathering, casting away, gathering and casting away each in their own God appointed time. I don’t know what the writer of Ecclesiastes had in mind when he wrote that particular line but it’s surprisingly literal in meaning for me as I learn to cast off heavy weights and hold onto solid truths.

‘Make our being grow into thy likeness.
If through the ages of strife and ages of growth, yet let us at last see thy face, and receive the white stone from thy hand.
That thus we may grow, give us day by day our daily bread.
Fill us with the words that proceed out of thy mouth.
Help us to lay up treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.’
G MacDonald