Have you ever had something on your “to do” list for a long time? I mean a LONG time. I have had the idea of a Memorial Box on my “to do” list for 10+ years and I am finally able to check it off. Woo hoo! I am so excited about this and plan to make several posts about our Memorial Box in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.
Chris and I originally heard about the idea of having a family Memorial Box when we took Gary Ezzo’s class, Growing Kids God’s Way, when Michaela and Benjamin were tiny. The idea struck a chord with us as something we wanted to do. A few years later we were reminded again of Standing Stones through an excellent video series with Ray Vander Laan, Faith Lessons. I kept this idea in the back of my mind and was recently reminded of it again through a bloggy friend’s encouragement. Linny does a great job of explaining a Memorial Box here, but I’ll try to just explain it briefly.
In Joshua 3 the Israelites had finally entered the Promised Land by way of the miraculous parting of the Jordan River. Joshua directed them to choose twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan and to set them down at their camp as a sign. He said, “In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them…….These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.” (4:6-7)
The most important thing for Chris and me as we raise our children is that we share our faith with them. Our faith is real and we want to give real examples of how God has been faithful to us; how He has miraculously provided, how He has worked in our lives, how He has demonstrated his love to us. Our children have themselves experienced many of these examples of faith. It is important to talk about them and remind ourselves of how good our God is and how active He is in our lives.
So we have been on a Wolfe family mission recently and finally found what will be our family Memorial Box. We can’t wait to fill it with our Standing Stones! These will be visual reminders for us and we will tell and retell their corresponding stories as our children or others ask, “What do these stones mean?”
Okay, so here is our first Standing Stone story. These stories will be in no particular order, but they all testify to God’s real presence in our family.
A year and a half ago we were in the waiting stages of Elijah’s adoption. We had already done all of our paperwork, but Elijah’s paperwork in China had not been completed yet. We had no promises whatsoever from their gov’t that we would be matched with him, we just knew that God has led us to Elijah and that he was our son. We had already put a lot of money on the line in full faith that God would work to make this adoption a reality. If you know anything about international adoption you know it isn’t cheap, but a mommy and daddy have to do what they have to do, right? It’s not like we have several grand sitting around, but we had faith that God would provide. We trusted that God would provide the monetary means, but we had no thought that he would provide in other ways as well.
Are you ready for this? We received literally a year’s worth of toilet paper for free! That is a story in and of itself, but in a nutshell we had a friend that was moving and somehow had all this toilet paper in his attic. He told us to take it and we gladly loaded Chris’ little pick-up with toilet paper rolls and moved it to our attic. I kid you not, this toilet paper lasted us exactly a year! Oh, and there were a bunch of Kleenex boxes and paper towel rolls as well that lasted close to a year. Does God have a sense of humor or what? We laughed about it but we also rejoiced over it because we saw it as a sign from Him that He was watching out for us and would provide. This provision wasn’t in greenbacks, but it did save us a lot of greenbacks that we would have had to spend and instead were able to apply toward our adoption expenses. In our obedience to the calling of adoption, He proved Himself to be faithful. So the first Standing Stone placed in our Memorial Box is a toilet paper tube. God is faithful in big and small ways!
I love that you are doing this and the memorial box (I gather you found antiquing – how cool!) is beautiful! God is good and I enjoy how He creatively provides through avenues we didn’t know would bless us so.
We picked up a standing stone ourselves while in China. How good that our God knows how these standing stones teach and build faith for us and our children.