We rarely rejoice over stumbling blocks. They seem to be something negative, put in our way that diverts us from the path we intended. While to me, the first stumbling blocks mentioned in scripture may change our course, they are grace rather than burden. In Joshua 4 the Israelites finally walk across the riverbed of the Jordan to enter the promised land. At the moment that has been forty years in the making Joshua instructs members of each tribe to collect rocks.
8 So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, as the LORD had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. 9 Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle of the Jordan at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of the covenant had stood. And they are there to this day.
21 He said to the Israelites, “In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ 22 tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ 23 For the LORD your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The LORD your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea[b] when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. 24 He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the LORD is powerful and so that you might always fear the LORD your God.”
They laid down rocks in their new home for one purpose; to invite questions. In the hope that someone might come so close as to almost trip on them and be forced to ask the meaning behind these rocks. The goal was to create something that stands out in the midst of the normal landscape of life that would drive others to curiosity so that they must ask. Then those who knew could answer and tell about a mighty God. The river rocks were put there to trigger the questions so that God’s story might be told.
I firmly believe that God puts these sort rocks in our lives. People plunked down in the middle of our journey, so different, that we would have to ask what makes them they way they are. What is it that causes their lives and actions to be such a stark contrast from the landscape around them? And in wanting to know, in the asking, we would hear their story, but more importantly, God’s story, about their own molding and shaping in the waters of their baptism, like stones being polished in the Jordan.
We burn with curiosity about what makes them the way they are only to find out that it’s not so much a what, as a who. They are certain of their identity in God and their lives stand as a living landmark telling the story of God’s work.
Sometimes God places these people so squarely in our path that we can’t help but stumble over them. For these ones I have known whose lives begged the questions that taught me about a God who is mighty and active in this world, a God who wants us to ask and seek and desires that we know His story so well that we live and breathe it, for these, I am so grateful that I have stumbled upon them. I can only pray that because of them and God’s work in me, my life may be one of these rocks as well that for others begs the questions that lead to life in Christ.
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