The initial idea felt almost \u201cpushed\u201d into my mind, like a kind of gift, or a whispered invitation: \u201cHere is something you can do.\u201d \u00a0I 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. \u00a0Yet I feel compelled to keep at it. \u00a0I feel almost as if I could not stop if I wanted to. \u00a0And I feel this task has been granted to me\u00a0despite, not because of, my interests and abilities.<\/p>\n
I imagine myself\u00a0like a stone in the scene of the Triumphal Entry, when Jesus replied to those who were asking him to shush his followers, \u201cI tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
I am a stone; I am\u00a0earthy, worldly, hardheaded, blind, deaf, and dumb, in certain ways and at certain times. \u00a0But aren\u2019t we all? \u00a0Peter describes christians\u00a0as \u201cliving stones\u201d. \u00a0We are animated by God\u2019s\u00a0Spirit. \u00a0I rarely have direct\u00a0awareness of the presence of that\u00a0Spirit, yet now feel stirred to do something that is a bit unnatural for me. \u00a0So I have started from scratch to learn some tools. \u00a0I plug away, using what scraps of time I can find, and a thing is slowly emerging. \u00a0I hope that eventually my project turns out to be a nice offering to the Maker, like a little stone crying out \u201chosanna!\u201d to Jesus.<\/body><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First of all, I must confess that I am not one who hears voices or sees visions. \u00a0Angels have never appeared in my bedroom. \u00a0I have difficulty believing in any kind of spiritual world sometimes (but so did Mother Theresa, and she still persevered). \u00a0That said, this project of mine, to start a blog and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-diary","tag-living-stones"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theundergroundchurch.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}