Stones

 You will all know by now that I like painting stones.  Mostly baby Jesus ones for Christmas, but Ive painted and decoupaged others too.  I find it therapeutic.  So when we re-joined Moneyreagh Community Church at the start of the year and the kids workers were looking for craft ideas I suggested stone painting.  On January 24th I sent a message to the Kids team leader suggesting that perhaps the children might do some stone painting for Easter and attached a photograph of a suitable design.   I had gone on Google images and trawled through hundreds of pictures of Easter stones and landed on this one.


The essence of doing crafts with kids is to keep it very simple and make sure that they can produce something which looks really good within the time frame allowed.   So this stone fit the bill on all counts.   But because the idea will be to hide lots and lots of stones around the village in the lead up to Easter I decided Id prepare a few stones in advance.  I thought that if I painted a few backgrounds then some of the kids could be putting the crosses on the pre-prepared ones whilst other kids were painting more backgrounds and letting them dry...... 

So in the last week of January I went to the beach and picked up some stones, brought them home and painted them.  I then set them to one side in a box and forgot about them.    Yesterday I lifted the box for some reason and looked at the stones and this is what I saw.


I was blown away.  Seriously, back in January I could have chosen any one of hundreds of designs for the stones.  But I chose this one.  Weeks before the war started.   In fact it makes me feel a bit..... odd.  God's ways are not our ways.   I dont think I would necessarily want to make any sort of political statement about the war as part of our church's celebration of Easter.  But I can't deny the ' in-your-face' nature of this 'coincidence'.    The death and resurrection of Jesus and the life giving message of salvation and hope through the cross speak deeply into our warring world.   If there was ever a time when we need to see the power of life over death, hope over despair and peace over war it is now.
Come Lord Jesus.






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