Drop the Rocks … Hello Hump Day Friends! Like most Southwestern states, New Mexico has a lot of rocks, red rock sheer wall, granite, sandstone, and lots of gem stones, too. It’s often called the “rock hounding state” –in Deming NM they have Rock Hound State Park where you can hunt for geodes. Rocks are interesting, they are, like humanity, diverse and have a variety of purposes. Line your garden or driveway, polish a gemstone and you get jewelry, throw a rock at someone and you can wound or kill, etc. Jesus even said rocks would praise Him if we didn’t…but one story always gets me in Jesus’ life and that is of the adulterous woman.

To me, this is one of the most powerful ones and easily creates a picture in your mind. In our society today we blink at it as sadly, adultery doesn’t mean much anymore, along with a whole lot of other morals we should be practicing.

You know the story. In John’s gospel, Jesus was teaching before a crowd of people, but the Pharisees, always trying to wrestle Jesus into saying or doing something that could be used as blasphemy, brought a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. So they asked him,

“Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” (John 8:4–5, ESV).

To this day Jesus response hits my heart…instead of an argument, He bent down and began writing on the ground with a stick (when I see Him in heaven I’m going to ask what He wrote!). The Pharisees kept it up so Jesus responded with words that cracked a bullet through the heads of all those there: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” … and then He continued writing on the ground.

Can you hear the stones drop? One by one, each person in that crowd turned around and walked away, dropping their stone on the ground. It was now harmless instead of a weapon. But for that woman, the lack of those stones began a healing she so deeply needed, the mercy and forgiveness of God that she probably felt she could never ever deserve. For her, freedom rained down in blessed drops of God’s tears to wash her sin and cleanse her soul.

I think it’s time that we drop our rocks. I mean it, really. I don’t care what side of the fence you are on with politics, religion, sexual preference, immigration, etc., … we need to drop our stinking rocks!!! It is time to rain down God’s love not condemnation for who are we to condemn or judge. Oh yes, we feel so justified when we can accuse someone caught in the act…especially someone that irritates us and we can’t stand what they say or do. Whoopee, payback time for them, right?—wrong.

But remember this – Christine Caine taught this in one of her pod casts and I love it: “When you accuse another of their sin, the rocks don’t hit the sin. They hit people. But the more we follow Jesus, the more we’ll begin seeing people for who they are, rather than what they do.”  OUCH!

In the past 3 months people have taken up deadly arms to kill, just the other night a 19-year-old boy killed 8 people, put 5 in the hospital, and then took his own life. Why? What is going on? I do not have THE answer but I have a few ideas:

  1. We are angry today and we easily throw rocks.
  2. We are selfish and if you get in the way of what we want, we throw rocks.
  3. We put our belief for a better country in politicians and if you disagree-we throw rocks.
  4. We don’t like your denomination, religion, or your “_______” so we throw rocks.

        ….and yet the rocks cry out in praise of their Creator

I remember the times when I did something foolish my parents, or my grandma, loved to say, “You’ve got rocks in your head, what did you think would happen?!”  Or we had a neighbor who would see something crazy and say “dumber than a box of rocks.” I would laugh at that and then something happened. One of our ushers at church, whose name was John and wanted to help at church so my husband Al helped him to become a lead usher, for a person with Downs Syndrome, that was like hitting the Lottery! One of the other ushers in our church laughed and commented “he’s dumber than a box of rocks, I don’t think it will ever work out.” Well, we’ve been gone from that church a long time and John remained an usher for many years after we left until he died. He never missed a Sunday and was always on time.

So let’s drop our rocks—the “word bombs” the social media “snarks” the “behind the back insinuations” etc. This is NOT what God wants us to do. In fact, I have a great idea was someone irritates you … smile nicely, then bend down and write in the dirt.