Memorial Stones

Yesterday we started off our month of family devotions related to thankfulness.  We still plan to do our thankfulness tree like we did last year, but since we have an extra Sunday before Thanksgiving this November, we took the opportunity to do something we've been planning for a while but hadn't sat down to do.  

This Fall I was studying Joshua at Bible Study while our class at church was also going through it and David and I both were struck by the idea of the memorial stones in Joshua 4.  After the Israelites crossed over the Jordan River, God commanded them to take stones from the midst of the Jordan and lay them on the edge.  And when their children asked them what the stones meant they would recall how God had dried up the water of the Jordan so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.

This year has been pretty rough in a lot of ways and even though we are starting to come out of the harder part of it all, we wanted to remember God's faithfulness to us-- regardless of how things turned out.

I shared in my iPhone rewind that we collected rocks on the path behind our apartment the day we turned our keys in.  That apartment was not something we ever would have anticipated, but it was such a place of God's provision for us when things felt really out of control.  So we thought it would be a good place to gather stones for our memorial.

Sunday we sat down for our devotional time.  I read part of the story of Joshua from the Big Picture Story Bible.  And then we talked about the stones of remembrance and how God is faithful to us.

Cooper helped us put the rocks into the vase we had set aside.

Most of them are blank, but we decide to write on a few of them as we talked about the things God has provided this year.  And Cooper wanted to write on one too-- he said he was writing "C-O-O-P-E-R" on his.  

A vase full of rocks.  To remind us of all that God has done and all that He is to us.  Our song for the week is Great is Thy Faithfulness, so we've also been singing that a lot the last few days.  I sing it sometimes at bedtime anyway, so as soon as I started it yesterday Cooper's face lit up and said "Oh I remember this song!"  May he always remember the faithfulness of God!