Why Do We Need Stones of Remembrance?

I grew up in the church. Not in the way that is often bandied about, but really grew up in the church. I was born into a pastor’s home, a pastor who then became a missionary. A large portion of my early life was spent in every kind of church imaginable, from houses and prairie chapels to ornate sanctuaries and mud huts. 

I grew up on hymns. The Worship in Song hymnal, to be exact. My dad could tell you just about any hymn number from memory. There was a line I sang that I didn’t understand, and it always made me laugh. I think because in my mind I correlated it with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol...“Here I raise my Ebenezer…”

I had no idea what it meant, and I will be honest, until I started writing this, I didn’t really know exactly what it meant but I had a vague idea of it meaning to commemorate what God has done. It comes from 1 Samuel 7:12:

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, “Till now the Lord has helped us.”

There are many instances in the Bible of setting up stones in remembrance of great works of God in the lives of the Israelites. The permanence of the material meant that it would be around for many generations to remember, but that remembrance hinged on something. You had to tell the subsequent generations why the stone was there and what it commemorated so that it would not be forgotten. Our gratitude is easily forgotten when we fail to tell about what God has done. 

Tell Your Story

On Sunday, our pastor was preaching on giving your testimony to the world. Telling people you come in contact with your story, or an adjacent story that you witnessed, that tells of the goodness and saving power of God. So he told a story about a young man whose father was on a trip with our pastor a couple weeks ago. 

This father received word that his son had broken his neck in a competitive wrestling event, which paralyzed him. The group of pastors he was with prayed for him, the man’s church prayed, and many others in the highly connected world we are in prayed for him.

The hospital did subsequent scans, and from one scan to the next, one showed a clearly broken neck, and the other a perfectly healthy neck, and with no medical explanation, the young man walked out of the hospital and gave his life to Christ. That is an Ebenezer.

Find Your Ebenezer

But an Ebenezer, or stone of remembrance that you tell your children doesn’t need to be a medical miracle. It could be finding a misplaced $10 bill when you needed gas to commute to a job. It could be a neighbor dropping off a meal when you didn’t have the money for groceries. A clean scan. A clean house. An unexpected kind word when it felt like the world was against you. 

Whatever it is that causes you to drop to your knees in gratitude to the God who gives perfect gifts is an Ebenezer. Tell it to your children. Tell it to your neighbors. Tell it to anyone who gives you an opening.

Training Tip: This week, try to find 3-5 small (or large) stones of remembrance that you can “set up” in gratitude to the God who sees you and loves you.