Living Stones

About a 20 minute drive from our house is a place called Ngwenya Compound.  Many  local people I know live in this community of small cement houses, or should I  say tiny rooms, with no electricity, no running water, and no sewage system.   This is city living verses the poverty of the village where many of them had  come from.  Just in their backyard is the place many of the people here go each  day to try and make a living, or just enough money to buy a small bit of food to  keep alive.  It is a shocking place that haunts my mind and each time I visit  here breaks my heart.  It is the rock quarry, this massive landscape of rock and  water that spans as far as the eye can see.

---

As I pull in and find a small open space where piles of crushed rock do not yet
encompass, I see dozens of children running towards me screaming “mazungu”, the  local word for white person.  I bring my visitors here with me to experience  another part of our world that words alone could not explain, a place that  reminds us of the solemn truth that the majority of the world resides in
conditions like this, while we are the exception in our western world  and
mind-sets. I jokingly point to my visitor and chant along with the children
“mazungu, mazungu” as the locals look at me and break into laughter.

Today the quarry has shifted from the last time I was here.  The pile of stones my local friend breaks has shifted to another location to move along with the receding rock as it is chipped away by the men.  The women sit in the blazing sun and heat from early morning until the end of the long day, on top of their pile of stone that they have been pounding by hand with only a small tool carved from the rock.  Their new born babies lie on some clear ground next to the rock while their other small children run around and play with friends.  Their hands are hard, callused, and aged from the years of pounding this stone and many are only in their early twenties.  The corporate pounding of stone echoes through the quarry like a choir chanting of how hard this life is with little hope of a different future.  The children are raised to see this as the only way of life, preparing them for their turn to inherit the pile of stone and area in the quarry where their family sits.  The family patiently wait for a buyer to pull up in their vehicle and load a wheel barrel of stones for just $1.50, while dozens of people quarrel as to whose pile will be bought this day.  This is a hard life, one not many can imagine.

---

But then there was a saviour… threatened to be beaten with stones similar to the ones the women break here at the quarry, for claiming he was the Son of God, fully man and fully God dwelling in our midst.  He built a spiritual kingdom established by His word and called us to be living stones in His temple, the body of Christ. As I look upon the piles of rock and desperation I am reminded that we are the living stones.  Our identity is not the pile of rock we sit on, it is in Christ Jesus, this identity and truth that over rides the hopelessness of our physical circumstances and momentary afflictions and guides us off the pile of our rock onto a new hope, destination, and destiny.

So today may you be encouraged to stand up from the middle of our circumstance, take your cross, and follow Christ.  For He is our only Hope in this world, He is the only one who can turn our lives on top of the piles of rock into a living stone…a life of beautiful miracles, signs, and wonders for all to see and be encouraged.  He is the only one who can teach us a better way to go and provide EVERYTHING we need to get there, regardless of even the most impoverished, impossible circumstances, if we choose to believe, receive, and actively follow Him.

“You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God’s temple… And YOU are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple"  1 Peter 2:4-5