Memorial Stones: The Knot

One of my favorite passages in the Bible comes from Joshua 4. The Israelites just finished crossing the Jordan, where God had parted the waters in order for them to pass, and Joshua commands one man from each of the twelve tribes to place a stone in the middle of the Jordan. This was in case their children asked them:
Joshua 4:6b-7
‘What do these stones mean?’ 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

I love that they honored God to make sure that their kids would know of His amazing grace. This is my version of my own memorial stone. The moment we found out that we were having a child we started praying. We prayed for his health, the nurses, friends, family, almost anything that we could think of. Now that he's here our prayers include thankfulness and excitement, particularly because there's a good chance that he wouldn't have been here. (By the way, the picture here could creep some people out, so scroll past it if you must.)

That's a knot in his umbilical cord. If the knot was tight enough then Nathaniel wouldn't have gotten nutrition, oxygen, and many other essential things. To put it in more blunt terms; he wouldn't have survived. It took several people clearing the room that afternoon for me to be able to express my sincere gratitude and emotion to God for honoring our requests to have a healthy baby. The grace and mercy of the Father to have even given us this gift for a few minutes was amazing, but to see him healthy, able to cry, and ready to feed off of his mother was amazing. I appreciate that He took those worries from me and let me see how He was able to shed grace and mercy on my son. We didn't see it until after the fact, but to not even have that worry was amazing. We are truly blessed to have Nathaniel Nicholas Gaspar with us. He is a living memorial to our Creator. As Proverbs 10:12 would tell us, "Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers all wrongs." God's love definitely covered and took care of all of us.