It dawned on me…I have written 2 poems, consecutively mind you, on stones, rocks…

Ecclesiastes 3:5 is in a famous passage which is listing things for which there are times and seasons.  So many of these things are complements to one another, things which spiral around into their time, and then spiral out and lay at rest while other things take prominence.

“…a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them…”

I have loved this passage (Eccl. 3:1-8)  over the years, as it is some poetry with a bottom that I have never reached, for every time I think I have sussed them out, Mama pushes the next button and the elevator floor drops out, or the ceiling blows off.  They are a sort of spiritual escalator into the eternal reaches of Truth, and it is our destiny and honor to search out those truths.

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter”.

So with my creative mind occupied by stones, I naturally thought of verse 5, which speaks of a time to gather stones together and a time to cast stones away, and oh how the last year has been a casting away of stones in my life!

Things I thought I knew, things I trusted and relied on, things I assumed were axiomatic, revealed to be sandstone and crumbling upon touch…and then the hammer blows, breaking chunks and chipping off bits and pieces of long years of hurt and loss and pain and suffering and loneliness in the core…

Who I once was, which although it never felt like me for real was none the less all I knew, and therefore was a security to me…going, going, gone…

But the true me, the inner me which managed to survive and is now beginning to come out like the lambs in spring from the stalls…she has been walking, I think, together with Mama, and rock hounding!

“PRETTY!” she says, and picks up another, and another, and soon I am finding a sort of stability returning, understandings, awareness…stones!  Piled, stacked, set in ways that are strange and alien and yet at the same time like old comfortable shoes…they just fit.

The real quest in this broken sphere is to get in synch with that time, season…when it is time to gather, resist the gravity which will seek to get you to cast away, and when it is time to cast away, open your hand and resist the urge to clamp down, clench down and be a miser with the things which must go.

I am Charissa Grace.

I am under the Mercy, and I am OK!