12 Stonesor: 'Do you remember the time when...'

I'm surrounded by signposts of journey, yet it's the memorials along the way that seem to stir right now.

Journey follows me...I've been reading through Joshua this week (the part where they're about to cross over the Jordan), I've just picked up a design book called 'Journeys' and, as I write, someone has just put on John Mayer's 'Continuum' as a soundtrack for my journaling.

We're hungry for continuity because so much of our lives can be lived in solitary isolation. Pilgrimage gives a sense of continuum—a journey connected: past, present and future. Not ephemeral snapshots in a photo album, but a legacy.

It could be a longing for significance, but I think it's greater than that. The eternity that God has set on our hearts makes us homesick for a place where the streets have no name and yet there's a journey to be fully lived before we get home. Our means of anaesthetising the past or present is usually through practising amnesia and yet forgetting has the habit of creating gaping holes in our hearts that long to be filled.

Perhaps one of the finest legacies we can leave for the generations ahead are the memorials, markers and testimonies of God's grace and faithfulness. To capture the punctuation marks of our journey with equal dignity as we do the evolving narrative.

In Joshua 4, it records the time when Joshua, fresh from a cleansing 40-year wander in the desert, finally reaches the banks of the Jordan. The story continues:

1 When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the LORD said to Joshua, 2 "Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, 3 and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan from right where the priests stood and to carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight."

4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever."

I think we need to take our own stones from the river. To take souvenirs along for the walk ahead. We need to be memorial builders. Not only to remind us of God's faithfulness, but to orientate our journey. To remind us where our strength and blessing comes from. Too often we forget. We soar to new heights (or plumb new depths) and forget where we've been. As John writes in Revelations 2, there are times to repent and do the things we did at first.

What do our memorials look like? What shape do they take? Some of mine are people. Some are marked with words in a journal. Or with celebration. But I'm being continually reminded to creatively dignify and celebrate the foundational stones of God's faithfulness and goodness in my life.

Inspired by a road trip from LA to New York with my mate Brad, a tangible phrase of memorial evolved: 'Do you remember the time when...'. I have a leaning towards the not yet as much as the now and this phrase always brings me back to the moment.

The (perhaps slightly strange) thing is that we use this phrase to remember both the now and the not yet. Admittedly our 'tenses' are all wrong, but stay with me. Before we began our road trip, Brad emailed me a couple of times and, somewhere in the email would say, 'Remember the time we drove across the States?'. He was dignifying the journey...before it had even begun.

As we drove through the Arizonan desert at dusk sucking up one of the most breathtaking vistas I've ever seen, I recall him saying: 'Remember that time we drove through the Arizonan desert as the sun was going down?' And I do. Four years on I can tell you this: We were in a Ford Explorer. It was 6.43pm. Tom Waits was singing 'Small Change'. And one cannot describe the hues of the sky that night with any justice. The thing is, the memorials we create along the way remind us of where we've been.

In the seasons, in the wilderness, on the open highway and by the raging river, God reminds us—as he reminded Joshua—to build memorials to remember His part on our journey. To dignify occasion and connect the dots of journey with the smooth stones of joy, of love, of repentance, of hope, of faith, of encouragement, of ecstasy, of tears and of peace that God puts in the river for us to collect. And collect them so you don't forget where you've been. Be found in the river.

Any smooth stones to be gathered at the moment?