The Rosetta Stone of our Ebenezers

An Ebenezer isn’t a Biblical Geezer. It’s a reminder and a sign of God’s presence at a particular time and place, a reminder to ourself and a testimony to others traveling the same path.

In 1 Samuel 7:12, Ebenezer refers to a memorial stone set up by Samuel to commemorate Israel’s victory over the Philistines. But it also refers to the place where Israel had been defeated twice and even lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines. 1Samuel 4:1, 5,1. So, an Ebenezer is not only a witness to Israel’s ultimate triumph with God’s help, but a testimony to the presence of God even in their defeats.

Having been an agnostic at one stage of my life, there was for me a specific conscious moment in which I risked asking Jesus to be my Savior and Lord. I can, in hindsight, see God’s footprints in my life during my times of denying Him and searching for Him. So, my moment of decision appears to me to be part of a lifelong process with God involved every step of the way.  It has also become obvious that letting Jesus actually be the Lord of my life remains an ongoing challenge of becoming free of the addictions to idols: the pleasures, opinions, prejudices, grudges, pretenses, people, etc. that I cling to.  The list is long.

At eighty-eight, I have collected a serious accumulation of both kinds of Ebenezers, the victories and the defeats. I’ve begun to see that the defeats are how we are stripped of our idol of self-sufficiency so we can learn to live grace-filled lives.

Dying to self seems to be a protracted and recurring struggle in the spiritual journey. It reminds me of a local production of Agatha Christy’s play, The Mouse Trap. My friend had her first part in a theatrical production. Unfortunately, her character was murdered in the first scene. On opening night, the killer was strangling her as she fell back onto a couch. But caught up in the thrill of her few moments of fame, she simply refused to die.  Each time she went limp and he started to let go of her, she revived, dramatically gasping and struggling to sit up, prolonging the scene until even the audience began to snicker

I have a strong suspicion that many of our own dying-to-self scenes are similarly prolonged and oft repeated.

Our Ebenezers are our personal experiences of the presence of God in our lives. We are different people, with varied backgrounds and diverse personalities, so our relationships with God and our experiences of grace will not all be the same.  God meets us however we are open to grace at different times in our lives.  It’s wonderful to find others with Ebenezers like ours, but sometimes we are disconcerted when we encounter people with very different experiences. We need to remember that God is not through teaching any of us while we are still breathing. And only God knows how to bring each of us closer to Himself. When we listen with open minds and hearts to others’ Ebenezers, we can begin to create a Rosetta Stone for understanding each other’s spiritual languages.  Then we can be open to the grace of God in the various stages of our own journey, even if it comes differently.