Living Stones

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Grace and I woke up in Tulsa this morning (I think that is the same place we went to bed last night. I was too tired to care.) It was kind of a "dive" of a motel down in the industrial area of Southern Tulsa but it was close to Route 66 and it had a keyboard, even though the spacebar didn't work very well. You wouldbegintotypeanditwouldlooklikethis. Then you would have to go back and pound on the spacebar to make sure it created a space. Needless to say, it was frustrating trying to write our blog.

I had mentioned that my high school friend Denny Larson from Stanley in lives in Tulsa. He married a girl a couple years behind us in school, Cheryl Maki. DEnny and I were on the wrestling team together and we were both dorks academically (sorry Denny). Denny and Cheryl live in Tulsa so we got together this morning. He rode over on his Harley and after breakfast, he rode all the way to Oklahom City (over 100 miles) with us. We stopped at a Route 66 museum in one small town and took sopme pictures of the famous "Round Barn", a famous Route 66 landmark, and headed on to Oklahoma City. He took led us downtown to the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. I always thought the idea of them building the memorial was a little too much. After seeing what I saw today, I realized I was wrong. It is a beautiful, serene park atmosphere that is sobering and heartwrenching to even the most calous observer.

168 people, both children and adults, lost their lives on that April day in 1995. On a large lawn is 168 stone and glass chairs with each person's name inscribed. The children are represented with smaller chairs. There are two large black marble towers at each end of a large reflection pool. On one tower is inscribed "9:01". At that time on the day of the bombing, life was very normal in Oklahoma City. Workers in the Murrah Federal Building had been at work for about an hour and the children were all happily playing in the employee daycare center within the building. On the other end of the reflection pool where the building once stood is another identical tower with the numerals "9:03. See, at 9:02 the bomb was detonated. At 9:03, Oklahoma City and the family and friends of those 168 people was changed forever. Never agaion would America feel quite as secure as they did at 9:01. Never again would the families of those people be as full of life and hope as they were at 9:01.

I got to thinking about today's text which comes from Joshua 4. Joshua and the Hebrew people had just approached the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. The water parted and they carried the Ark of the Covenant across. The people from each of the 12 tribes were instucted to pick up stones and pile them up on the shore as a memorial of what God had done that day. Neverwould their lives be the same. Never would they have to wander aimlessly as people without a home. The Promissed Land that had been promised several hundred years earlier to Abraham, then Isaak, then Jacob -- would now become a reality.

What I liked about the memorial in Oklahoma City is that the place did not feel like a cemetery, but rather a place of hope. Words were inscribed on stones, concrete, glass and walls that used words like "hope", "Peace", and "healing". A place of devastation had in some ways, been transformed into a -place that teaches us that life does go on and we can find hope. God redeemed his people and gave them hope and a home in the wilderness of the Jordan, and he continues to bring hope today.

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