Sunday, September 9, 2007

every sunday night during the school year for the last 3 years, i have been blessed to have a great group of high school girls come over. we eat brownies that sometimes don't taste much like brownies, we drink sickenly sweet red kool-aid, and we talk about life and God. We've talked about some pretty heavy topics.Tonight was our first night back together after the summer. I hadn't planned to do much, a lot of times they just need time to talk and catch up. If we had time, we'd continue on with the study we started last year. However, God showed up and had other plans.Since the first year of meeting, my girls have lit candles to signify they are ready to begin our time together. For Christmas last year one of the girls gave me this beautiful votive holder, it holds like 12 votives in a straight line. It's beautiful. During that first year, we read about Joshua leading the Israelites across the Jordan River, and how when all had crossed, 12 men went back to take a rock from the center of the river. They were going to stack up the stones so that whenever later generations asked what the rocks were for, the fathers would reply, those are from the Jordan River. God brought us across. We should always remember what God has done for us. That night we all took rocks and wrote things we needed to remember that God had done in our lives. It became the focus of many discussions, and was one of my favorite areas in my old apartment.Tonight I told the girls we needed to set up our altar. Since I moved, I haven't unpacked personal things, so this would be the first. They choose a location, and started unpacking the rocks. We realized that only 1 of the current girls was here when we first did that. She and I were overwhelmed with how much we've been through together in the last 3 years. I opened my Bible and read to them from Joshua about why we had this. We grabbed some more rocks and markers and started adding our own rocks to the altar. We realized we have so many things we need to remember that God has done in our lives.Not surprisingly, I had a conversation with a friend today about this very thing. He encouraged me to focus on what God has done in my life, not on what he hasn't done yet.I thought it was interesting that the whole focus of the evening became this very point. So I leave you with that. What do you have written on your stones? Do you need to stop and think a bit more about the stones making up your altar of thankfulness to God? Or like me, do you keep looking at those couple of rocks that don't have anything written on them yet? I took some time and added a few rocks tonight. I want to remember God's faithfulness so far in my life. This is the evidence that I have that he will remain faithful.