For Living Stones- both big and small

“Do you want to go to Israel with me in the spring?”

I looked at my mom like she was crazy.  I couldn’t go to Israel in the spring.  We were getting ready to bring home Carter.  I had spent the last year walking in the direction of that little boy in China.  How could I plan to just go off on a trip to another country just ten months after we brought him home?  Besides, if I went anywhere it would be back to Brazil and the people of the Amazon.  My last trip there had changed my heart so much and I really wanted to be on this year’s boat with the Shenandoah nursing students.

Fast-forward several months.  We were home with Carter and he is amazing and our life with him is blessed more than we ever expected.  I decided things were going well enough to do something completely extravagant and selfish and take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity to travel with my mother in the Holy Land.  I thought it would be a fun, relaxing chance to have quality time with my mom, the woman I admire most in the world.

Boy was I wrong.  This trip was fun but it was anything but relaxing.  I did not know that I was essentially tagging along on a trip planned by Lynne Hybels and Shauna Niequist for women much more important and accomplished than myself.  Women who are real writers and real bloggers and have ministries and fans and literally hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers.  I suppose it is a good thing I didn’t know, or I would have never gotten on the plane.

So there I was, on a bus traveling around Israel with amazing women learning about a land whose stories and problems are heartbreaking and unsolvable.  All day, every day, our fearless leader, Todd Deatherage from the Telos Group took us to meet people with unbelievable stories to tell.  Stories about displacement, conflict, hurt, loss, and grief.  Stories about forgiveness, friendship, hope, and reconciliation.  We met Israelis.  We met Palestinians.  We met Jews.  We met Muslims.  We met Christians.  Each person we met has lost something or someone in the wars that have ravaged their land over the years.

"We Refuse To Be Enemies" sign at entrance to the Tent of Nations

I began to feel small.  Tiny and cosmically inconsequential.  What do I, a mom and a  small town doctor, have to offer this issue?  I have no political clout.  I have no cultural influence.  My Instagram followers are mostly a bunch of Camdyn’s middle school friends.  I wondered why I was even on the trip in the first place.  Why wasn’t I getting on that boat in the Amazon?  At least there I would have a role that mattered and there would be a purpose to my presence.

Bethlehem where we met with the amazing Sami Awad

Here is the entry point of grace in this story: it just so happened that while I was waiting to board my plane for Israel, I read this scripture from the Lenten lectionary:

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

‘The stone that the builders rejected
   

 has become the most important one;

this is what the Lord has done,
 

and it is amazing in our eyes’?”

Matthew 21:42

We like to call Jesus a carpenter, but the Greek word used to describe him, tekton, really translates as craftsman.  He built things.  Most of what was built during the first century was made from stone.  Walls made from ancient, well-hued stones that were expertly selected and put together by master craftsmen are still standing today.  I saw many of them on this trip.  I placed my hands on the remnants of the Temple, what some call the “Wailing Wall,” and thought about those stones.  Perfect. Strong.  Huge. Used for something Important.  Jesus himself would have chosen such stones for the cornerstone of the buildings he built.  He would have inspected them for cracks, looked closely for flaws, and cast aside the stones unfit for building.  He knew the value of symmetry and power.

Jesus also knew that he, himself, would be measured and would be declared unworthy by his own people.  Jesus, the craftsman, knew he would be the rejected stone.  The perfect stone would be cast aside and proclaimed weak, flawed,….unimportant.   Yet Jesus chose to become one of us, one of the broken and rejected stones.

Looking out to the Sea of Galilee from the ruins of the ancient synagogue in Capernaum

This verse went round and round in my head during our trip.  Over and over again it would come to mind.  I think God was showing me that in many ways peace has already arrived among the living stones of the Holy Land.  It’s like he was whispering to my heart,  “Look! Look at what I am doing here.  Grace is abundant in the land.”  I began to see that it’s the women who are slowly but surely changing things.  The women who are tired of fighting, tired of burying their children, and tired of waiting for someone else to find the path to peace.  The women are there building bridges, cooking jam, sharing their grief, bearing the burdens of their enemies, and speaking peace.  Step by step, Israeli and Palestinian women are marching together towards an end to the conflict.


Among the world’s living stones, the women of the Middle East are “the stones that the builders have rejected.”  If not rejected, they have been dismissed as unimportant and irrelevant by outside observers.   Women are many times the forgotten ones in the realm of international politics.  On a geo-political perspective, they are often powerless and their voices go unheard.  They live unseen behind veils and burkas and in hidden places like kitchens and gardens.

Making jam with women from the Parents Circle Families Forum

What I came to see on my trip is that of all the living stones in the Holy Land, these women have become the most important stones of all.  The Lord is using them to bring about a “peace that surpasses all understanding.”  They are Kingdom Builders.  Every act of forgiveness, every gesture of kindness, and every hand reached out in friendship is building God’s kingdom here on Earth. The women I met in Israel are strong and courageous.  They are fierce and tenacious.  When peace comes to their land, it will be because they have stood hand in hand, Israeli and Palestinian together, and spoken love against a fire-wall of hate.  While the rest of the world isn’t watching, the women of Israel and Palestine are indeed becoming living stones, building bridges between enemies.  This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing!

My mom with Robi Damelin of The Parents Circle- you can read her incredible story here.

I’ve always loved this beautiful prayer that Lynne Hybels once wrote called "A Creed for Dangerous Women":

Dear God, please make us dangerous women.
May we be women who acknowledge our power to change, and grow,
and be radically alive for God.
May we be healers of wounds and righters of wrongs.
May we weep with those who weep and speak for those who cannot
speak for themselves.
May we cherish children, embrace the elderly, and empower the poor.
May we pray deeply and teach wisely.
May we be strong and gentle leaders.
May we sing songs of joy and talk down fear.
May we never hesitate to let passion push us, conviction compel us,
and righteous anger energize us.
May we strike fear into all that is unjust and evil in the world.
May we dismantle abusive systems and silence lies with truth.
May we shine like stars in a darkened generation.
May we overflow with goodness in the name of God and by the power of Jesus.
And in that name and by that power, may we change the world.
Dear God, please make us dangerous women. Amen.




These are the women I met in Israel.  They shine like stars and overflow with goodness.  They are the dangerous women that will change the world.

The Path to Peace Mosaic on the Gaza border wall

I left home for Israel facing equally unsolvable problems here in my small corner of the earth:
a heroin epidemic that is ravaging the people of my community…
babies born addicted to drugs….
children with unexplained bruises….
mothers with a complete lack of hope for their child's future….
grandparents, aunts, and uncles who are overwhelmed by the burden of raising children whose parents are in jail or lost to the abyss of addiction.

Every day I feel powerless to fix my patients’ real problems.  Many of them need so much more than what I have to offer and the scope of my ability to make things better for them seems like never enough.  So many times I ask God what can be done to fix things.  What can anyone do to make all this poverty and addiction better?  What can I do when I am just a small piece of a big messy puzzle?  But while I sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, I realized a beautiful, God-whispered thing-

Amazing grace is this- God reaches into the pile of rejected stones, the rubble of forgotten and unimportant ones and chooses us.  He holds us up to the light of His love and in spite of our flaws, our weaknesses, our smallness, He declares us perfect.  We are all chosen by Him to be Kingdom builders, to be one of his precious, beautiful, “living stones.”  God delights in his ability to use the broken ones, the forgotten ones, …the irrelevant ones.  This is what the Apostle Paul meant when he said that in our weakness, Christ is made perfect.  In my weakness, Christ is made perfect.

 I am just beginning to believe that it may be true, even of me.  In my weakness, in my smallness, and in my flaws, Christ is made perfect and Kingdom building can happen.  If God can use the women of Israel and Palestine to do amazing things, then certainly in ways unseen to me the Lord can use me- my smallness, my flaws, my imperfections, and even my weakness to build his Kingdom here in this place he has called me to labor.  A place mixed with so much beauty and sadness.

After this trip I have begun to think that maybe, God is making me a dangerous woman.

This is what the Lord is doing, and it is amazing to me.  

Sea of Galilee