Mountains and Milestones
Monday (September 8)
Mountains and Milestones
1 Samuel 6:15, 18
And the Levites took down the ark of the LORD and the box that was beside it, in which were the golden figures, and set them upon the great stone. … The great stone by which they set down the ark of the LORD is a witness to this day in the field of Joshua of Beth shemesh.
Often, the only thing separating a magnificent natural wonder and a profound spiritual event is a little inscription to memorialize the marriage of the two.
Every billowing Niagara that isn’t distinguished by some pebble mound to herald the salvation of a pilgrim or the local revival or the baptism of a new believer is like a musical score without a title. Imagine if Handel’s ‘Messiah’ was just an untitled hymn or Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ was called ‘No-Name,’ or the name of Chopin’s ‘Nocturne’ was left blank. Even a simple title, even if it contains only one little word, makes a world of difference, doesn’t it? Because a word like ‘moonlight’ and ‘night’ and ‘Messiah’ is imbued with meaning and color and symbolism, which takes beautiful musical notes and attaches them to deeper spiritual import. The same is true of natural phenomena as well. Great big boulders and bald mountaintops and rushing waterfalls and millennia-old sequoias are spectacular on their own, just as they are, but when these earthy substances get married to special movements in the pilgrim’s journey, when that mountain suddenly becomes an altar or that Grand Canyon becomes the backdrop of a holy matrimony (as was the case for my wife and I) or that boulder becomes a monument to a significant triumph, mere rocks become cornerstones and mere mountains become monuments and mere trees become towering generation-spanning pillars of remembrance.
I wonder, friend: what physical, tangible monuments to God’s intervening, incarnational work in your life of faith have you set apart and passed down to your own posterity? Are there special places in the world where Heaven stooped down to meet you, or pull you out of some mire, and you’ve marked it somehow? I suggest that we can’t say with a straight face that we live entirely on the words and works of Christ if our backyards and vacation sites and hunting trails and commutes aren’t distinguished with hundreds of great stones that we’ve ascribed as milestones.