joy
“The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone of the structure.” Mark 12:10
We had some work done in our garden last week; nothing too exciting: a new fence, a bit of pruning, and a bit of levelling off of the ground. Our garden is quite small so every part of it is precious and much needed! We have three daughters, including a very inquisitive preschooler who loves investigating outdoors, so we were thrilled when the work was done and the limited space in our garden was maximised.
As the guys were finishing off, they were levelling the ground and discovered a BIG stone in the
ground. They were really surprised at its size, and it took the two of them to move it onto a level surface to investigate it. After a bit of debate and cleaning off, they decided it was a “cornerstone,” probably from the house next door, which used to be a manor. (Just to clarify, we do not live in a manor of any kind! Our house is messy, well-loved, used, run through with an the array of crunched up potato crisps on the sofa, paint spillages, dirty clothes and everything else that goes with a house of three girls!) The guys surmised that it probably would have been part of a wall at one time, bordering our house. The shape of it and the way it had been chiselled certainly seemed to fit with the description of a cornerstone. It was covered in dirt but, at the same time, it was beautiful.
We had some work done in our garden last week; nothing too exciting: a new fence, a bit of pruning, and a bit of levelling off of the ground. Our garden is quite small so every part of it is precious and much needed! We have three daughters, including a very inquisitive preschooler who loves investigating outdoors, so we were thrilled when the work was done and the limited space in our garden was maximised.
As the guys were finishing off, they were levelling the ground and discovered a BIG stone in the
ground. They were really surprised at its size, and it took the two of them to move it onto a level surface to investigate it. After a bit of debate and cleaning off, they decided it was a “cornerstone,” probably from the house next door, which used to be a manor. (Just to clarify, we do not live in a manor of any kind! Our house is messy, well-loved, used, run through with an the array of crunched up potato crisps on the sofa, paint spillages, dirty clothes and everything else that goes with a house of three girls!) The guys surmised that it probably would have been part of a wall at one time, bordering our house. The shape of it and the way it had been chiselled certainly seemed to fit with the description of a cornerstone. It was covered in dirt but, at the same time, it was beautiful.
At first glance, this space is paradise: snowy mountain peaks rising above forests of conifers, crystalline blue lakes tucked into valleys, wild flowers carpeting meadows and open places with rainbow hues.
It isn't until your boots are crunching across rocks, your breath a little harder to catch than normal while scrambling up the trail, that you start to understand that there is something deeper to all of this undeniable beauty.
Life at an altitude of 10,000 feet is hard.
Spindly conifers stretching tall and lean toward the sun live in precariously thin soil on rocky mountainsides.
Delicate alpine wildflowers survive nightly temperatures have hover near freezing, even in July.
Those incredible clouds rolling over the peak just yonder can suddenly turn your morning romp through the mountain meadows into a mad dash for the trail head as thunder rumbles in the distance and as a wall of rain closes out the glorious sunshine.
Breathtaking beauty so often goes hand in hand with hard circumstances.
And so here we, the girls of TRE, our families along with many friends, find ourselves, sipping coffee during the early morning hours on the eve of Climbing Day.
We celebrate Katrina Serenity Stigman with this final, 10th Anniversary hike for Katie's Club in this land of hard beauty up Mount Holy Cross.
We celebrate her life. Her legacy. Her breathtakingly beautiful response to life when it got impossibly hard. And, most importantly, her unshakeable faith in Christ.
We love you, Katrina.
Lord, show us beauty in the impossibly hard places in life. Bring comforting memories and laughter to our lips as we remember those we've loved deeply. Hold us close as we navigate circumstances that are bigger than ourselves, and help us to do it with the same abundant grace and faithfulness that made Katrina so beautiful, inside and out.
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