AL: Joni, I know your father meant a great deal to you. You talk so much about him in your books… and Margaret and I remember so well that time we visited the home which he built for his family back in Maryland… and those beautiful stone walls he laid by hand all around the edge of your homestead…
JONI: There wasn’t a man in Maryland who could build a stone wall like my daddy.
AL: He was pretty artistic that way… ?
JONI: No doubt he was an artist…
AL: And a builder! That was a beautiful two-story home he designed and built…
JONI: Daddy was able to combine his building skills with his artistic talent, especially when he designed his stone walls – he loved to lay a good wall. When I looked at Daddy’s walls I’d think it was something out of a Robert Frost poem.
AL: I remember that one in front of your home – it looked like a weathered sentry… balanced and sturdy.
JONI: When my father would build a wall, he wouldn’t rush. He would unload a big pile of boulders, then sort through them, putting aside the ones for the wall. Daddy would pick up a rock, brush off the dirt, turn it over in his hands, and line it up, this way and that, placing it just right in the wall. Then Daddy would cement it in with the trowel.
AL: Joni, I looked up this Scripture right before we started. It’s from 1 Peter 2:4-6 and it says, “As you come to [Jesus], the living Stone--rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him--you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says: ‘See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.’”
JONI: Oh, Al, that’s a great verse. Jesus is our cornerstone – the stone that others rejected – and we are his living stones. I like to picture one of Daddy’s stone walls when I hear that verse. I mean, just imagine the saints who, through the ages, saw persecution and pestilence, Holocaust and heartache – they realized they could face anything, any kind of suffering, as long as they also knew they fit in God's kingdom…they fit into his wall, so long as they knew they were living stones being trowelled into the kingdom building.
AL: Each one carefully handpicked by God to fit into his wall of salvation…
JONI: And they understood that their hardships were worth it… that life was worth living if it meant more time given for the world to hear the Good News… more time for the rest of the stone wall to be completed.
AL: Well, I for one am glad that God has taken his trowel and his mortar and he has cemented me into his kingdom…
JONI: And I'm praying that even more living stones will be added today until that last soul has been rescued – that last stone picked up, brushed off, and fit into the kingdom building wall and what a beautiful dwelling, what a beautiful home will be made of us living stones.
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JONI AND FRIENDS
P.O. Box 3333
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