Here I Raise Mine Ebenezer

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah. He named it Ebenezer, explaining, “The Lord helped us to this very point.” (1 Samuel 7:12, CEB version) 

My mom likes to wander through cemeteries. When I was a kid, she would take me to cemeteries that had meaning to her, but also sometimes we would be driving by one on back roads and we would stop and go traipsing through them. It is where I learned my cemetery etiquette: don’t walk over graves, but around them.  She continued this tradition when my son was small, for some reason feeling like she needed to justify it with him, saying, “He is the son of a pastor. He needs to be comfortable in cemeteries since he will be in them a lot.” 

I didn’t interrupt her with the truth that I would only bring my son to funerals where I was burying family. Otherwise, funerals are not usually a place where the pastor’s family is expected to show up.  Besides, it is true that as a pastor’s kid, death would be very much a part of his life – mostly interrupting his life as his mom had to rearrange the family schedule for funerals. 

Anyway, all this is to say, strangely enough I feel deep roots in cemeteries. Which is why driving past the cemetery next to Oakley Chapel in Rogers was so shocking in the days after the tornado. There were deep roots in that cemetery too, many of which were attached to old trees. And now those roots were exposed, reaching up to the sky instead of anchoring deep into the earth. And as they tipped over, they pulled up gravestones all around them. 

There may be no more poignant image of the tornado damage than overturned and uprooted gravestones. Tornados disrupt the normal order of things. Gravestones are raised for the very purpose of holding things in place. They are markers of lives that have been, and ensigns of lives beyond. They stand in the space between life and death and hold watch for us. And they hold the names of the ones we love. They stand watch over the families they represent. They are, in a sense, signs of assurance that our lives mattered, mattered enough to mark them. And they hold our memory. They help us not forget. And they are almost never moved, which was what was so unsettling about their overturning from the roots up. It felt like we were uprooted. 

People raised stones in the Bible too. Often, those stones were raised to mark important moments, as when Jacob took a stone to mark the dream he had where God had passed the covenant promise down to him (Genesis 28). And then there is the Ebenezer that Samuel sets up in 1 Samuel 7, to mark when the Philistines unsuccessfully went against the Israelites after the Israelites had the Ark of the Covenant returned to them. Samuel raised it as a reminder that the Lord had helped them in times of trouble. 

A reminder that the Lord had helped them in times of trouble... 

I have had many such reminders as we have begun to dig out from under the wreckage of the disaster. In my previous post, I shared some of those instances that reminded me how God’s Holy Spirit encourages, empowers, and sustains us through such times. But as I stood looking at the overturned gravestones, my first reaction was not to recall those things, but instead to feel the full pain of what we were going through. To weep at how those stones of remembrance were overturned. And to feel trepidation of what memory will mean for so many of us in the days, weeks, months and years to come. They were memories that were triggered twice within three weeks of the tornado when we had two additional thunderstorms roll through at 2 a.m. again! After one of those, again on a Saturday night, a significant number of my worship staff showed up late. All of them had been awakened by the storm, struggled to get back to sleep, finally passed out and slept through their alarms. All of them. Because all of us have the effects of trauma to deal with now. All of us will have that memory to contend with now. 

So I felt the strong desire not to remember. But I know the persistence of memory. It is rare such things disappear completely, though sometimes they are just subsumed in behavior that looks strange until you understand the story behind it. 

But as I looked at those overturned graves, I also recalled another memory. It is a memory of a story I have long held dear. It is a memory of a story that has sustained me through all kinds of overturning in my life. It is a memory that has carried me beyond trauma into hope. 

It is the memory that Christ did overturn graves. That Christ defeated death. That nothing in heaven or in earth can separate me from the love of Christ Jesus.  

And then it occurred to me that maybe the best, most hopeful memory stone, one that truly claims the ultimate help God gives us, would be an overturned gravestone. Because a gravestone standing in memory to a life done lived is not truly reflective of our faith. A memory stone of a death overturned is our real hope.  

So in the midst of our loss and our trauma, I hold on to the image of overturned gravestones. That is our true hope. And that is our persistent memory. And that will ultimately take us home.  

Here I raise mine Ebenezer 

Here by thy great help I’ve come 

And I hope by thy good pleasure 

Safely to arrive at home. 

“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” - Robert Robinson 

This blog is part two of the series “Tornado Tracts” in which Pastor Michelle Morris reflects theologically on the realities of going through a natural disaster. This one is published as Hurricane Beryl bears down on the Caribbean. We remind you that 100% of gifts given at to UMCOR go to support those who are recovering from disasters.