a pile of rocks

hi there, me again. It's been a month since my last blog. Lots of thoughts but not much time to organize them or write about them.
Anyway......
A few months ago, our pastor did an awesome sermon series from the book of Joshua. One of the stories from Joshua goes like this. God had brought the people of Israel to banks of the Jordan River. Across this river was the land God had promised to them. However, they faced a dilemma. They had to get this mass amount of people across the river safely and proceed with conquering the land. An interesting fact is that at time of year, the Jordan was at flood stage, making the crossing even more problematic. To God, however, there was no dilemma. After camping on the river bank, Joshua gathered the people to hear the Word of the Lord. He then ordered the priests carrying the ark of the covenant to lead them in crossing the river. In Joshua 3:15 the Bible tells us that as soon as their feet touched the water the river stopped flowing! The priests carrying the ark of the covenant stood firm on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan while the whole nation crossed (v 17). When everyone had crossed the Lord told Joshua to to choose one man from each of the 12 tribes and tell them to each take a stone from the middle of the Jordan where the ark of the covenant stood and take it back to where they were now camping. There Joshua set up the twelve stones to serve as a sign, a monument of sorts. In the future, when their children asked what the stones meant they would be able to tell them how God was faithful to His promise and had brought them to the Promised Land by holding back the flow of the Jordan River (4:1-7).
Our pastor then prompted us to think about things in our lives that God had taken us through and he encouraged us to have our own pile of rocks to commemorate God's faithfulness in taking care of us, His children; something that when our children or others asked what it meant we would be able to share what God had done. On the way home that day, Dan and I talked about how we wanted to have some type of pile of rocks to remind us of God's faithfulness and mercy in plucking us off the brink of financial ruin and blessing our obedience to His principles on handling the money He entrusts us with. We kind of left it there with no real consensus on what our pile of rocks would be. Several weeks later, as part of our Financial Peace University class, we brought our shredder to class and Dan and I shredded about 20 or 30 credit cards. That's right I said 20 or 30! You didn't know there were that many different kinds did you? We had long since stopped using them but had tucked them in a drawer. It felt great to shred them and for a while I put the shredded bits of plastic in a small glass candy jar and set it in our office where we could see it and reflect on how far God had taken us. A pile of rocks? Kind of I guess, but it gets better. A week or so ago I was sitting in there, looking at the jar, thinking about nothing in particular, and it hit me what our pile of rocks should be. Our monument to our release from the slavery of debt would emerge of this:

I took the shredded cards and arranged them on a cookie sheet and baked them until they held together in the shape of the letters. I had flashbacks of crafts I had done with my Girl Scout troop 25 years ago! It created some fumes in our kitchen that probably left us a few brain cells lighter but I love how it turned out. The placard in the center displays the scripture that spoke volumes to us from the beginning. We had printed it out and taped it to our bill organizer box so that when we were struggling to get our house in order we could read it and know that God would bless our efforts. It is Malachi 3:10 - "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, "says the Lord Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of Heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it." Today I hung our pile of rocks in our office. It is the first thing we see when we walk in the door. We don't want to ever forget where we were and how far God have taken us. I am still astounded every day by the magnitude of blessing that God has showered upon us.

So what has He done for you lately?

What will your pile of rocks be to remind you of His unchanging goodness and faithfulness?

Kendra