The Story You Stopped Telling

There is a stone standing at the edge of a barley field, on the track between two towns, and it has been there longer than anybody's grandfather.

It is not beautiful. It is a rough gray block about the height of a boy, set upright where the field meets the road. Goats scratch their backs on it. In August the barley half hides it. Nobody tends it, nobody has ever cleaned it, and there is a name cut into one face, worn nearly smooth, that a man carved with his own hands the day after everything went right when everything should have gone wrong.

And here is what the stone does. Nothing. It stands there. It does not glow, it does not hum, it does not ask anybody to feel a particular way about it. A man can go by that stone furious, or bored, or so tired he does not lift his head, and the stone is exactly as much of a stone as it was the day it went in.

Now come three thousand years forward and stand in a kitchen in a different country.

Rafa used to tell the story at every table he sat at. What happened in the car park, and how he sat in the driver's seat afterwards with his hands shaking and everything in his life visibly different from the way it had looked forty minutes before. He told it at his cousin's wedding. He told it to a man at a bus stop. For six years it was the first thing anybody learned about him.

Then it got shorter. Not deliberately. Someone at a barbecue said, warmly, not unkindly, that adrenaline does astonishing things to people, and Rafa laughed and agreed and told it shorter after that. Then the feeling that used to come up in his chest when he told it stopped coming up. Then he could not remember whether the car park had been on the second level or the third, and that bothered him more than it should have, because if he could get that wrong.

Now when somebody asks how he came to faith, Rafa says, "Ah, long time ago," and passes the plate.

You have a version of that. There was something, and you told people, and then one year you noticed you had stopped. Nobody argued you out of it. What happened is quieter and worse: the memory thinned, and the feeling that used to authenticate the memory went with it, and you were left holding a story whose only witness is a version of you that you are no longer sure you trust.

The man who put the stone in the ground

That stone in the barley had a builder, and his name was Samuel.

The day before he set it up had been the worst kind of day: the whole nation gathered in one place, badly outnumbered, thunder coming down over the field, and by evening it had gone the other way entirely and every one of them was walking home alive and astonished. Samuel did not preach about it. He went and found a stone, and he dragged it upright between the two towns where the road runs, and he cut a name into it.

Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.1 Samuel 7:12

Hitherto. Up to this point. Not a prophecy, not a slogan. A plain statement of what had already happened, put somewhere it could not be edited by anybody's mood.

Take that word for yourself before we go any further. You have a hitherto, and it is not a mood you are supposed to be able to summon on demand: it is the plain record of what God has already done up to the chair you are sitting in. 1 Samuel 7:12 is where that word comes from, and the Spirit is the One putting it into your mouth now, in the past tense, where nothing can get at it.

Understand what that stone is doing on that road, because this is the whole hinge of it. It is not there to make people feel something. It is there because Samuel knew perfectly well that in nine years the same men who wept that night would be arguing about the details, and he wanted the account to survive the arguing. The stone is not a monument to an emotion. It is a witness that keeps standing after the witnesses have all gone home.

You have a sign like that, and it is not made out of your memory. You were given something that stands whether or not you can date it, describe it well or feel anything when you speak of it. That is not my comfort talking: 1 Samuel 7:12 shows a witness set in the ground precisely because feelings do not stay, and the Holy Spirit is the One holding your sign upright while your recollection goes soft at the edges.

The sign was put where God looks

Now the other picture, and it is the one that finishes the argument.

After the flood, God binds Himself to every living thing on the earth and gives a sign for it. He hangs it in the sky, which is the one place nobody can take it down from, and then He says something you've probably never noticed.

And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant.Genesis 9:16

I will look upon it. Not you. Him.

The sign of that binding was not installed for human beings to gaze at until they feel reassured. It was installed where God looks. He is the one checking it. Which means the sign is doing its work on the afternoons when nobody on earth is thinking about it, on the days you drive to work in silence, in the years you did not once look up.

So take the weight off yourself. You have been trying to be the custodian of a thing God signed, and you were never given that job. What God set in place is standing where He looks at it, exactly as Genesis 9:16 says, and His Spirit is the One keeping it in view, so it is already secured, and secured on the far side of your memory rather than inside it.