First of all, I must confess that I am not one who hears voices or sees visions.  Angels have never appeared in my bedroom.  I have difficulty believing in any kind of spiritual world sometimes (but so did Mother Theresa, and she still persevered).  That said, this project of mine, to start a blog and website, has seemed almost to be from beyond myself.

The initial idea felt almost “pushed” into my mind, like a kind of gift, or a whispered invitation: “Here is something you can do.”  I am early in the work, and I am humble enough to realize I am only one of billions of websites out there; it may never garner much attention or merit much praise.  Yet I feel compelled to keep at it.  I feel almost as if I could not stop if I wanted to.  And I feel this task has been granted to me despite, not because of, my interests and abilities.

I imagine myself like a stone in the scene of the Triumphal Entry, when Jesus replied to those who were asking him to shush his followers, “I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” I feel as though I have been invited to add my small voice, and perhaps I am doing so because some of the more appropriate voices (the established church leaders) are being silenced or have decided to hold their peace.

I am a stone; I am earthy, worldly, hardheaded, blind, deaf, and dumb, in certain ways and at certain times.  But aren’t we all?  Peter describes christians as “living stones”.  We are animated by God’s Spirit.  I rarely have direct awareness of the presence of that Spirit, yet now feel stirred to do something that is a bit unnatural for me.  So I have started from scratch to learn some tools.  I plug away, using what scraps of time I can find, and a thing is slowly emerging.  I hope that eventually my project turns out to be a nice offering to the Maker, like a little stone crying out “hosanna!” to Jesus.