Following Regenesis

A friend of mine from high school recently started a fairly ambitious personal project.  The Regenesis Project is his year-long quest to determine for himself what he considers “success,” and to achieve as much of it as possible.

Reading his initial post is in no small part the catalyst for getting my own blog up and running.  I have a somewhat different approach to the same task, I think, so I won’t  be following his agenda.  But that’s really the idea of the whole thing — for him to find success for himself, and to call others to discover their own definitions and paths to success.

I tend to think and organize my life in terms of values, of what things are most important to me.  I’m bad at checklists and to-dos, which is exactly where this friend of mine started.  I’m a philosopher and theorist at heart — concrete steps are suffocating to me.  Instead, I want to explore my values and the influence my choices have on my life and relationships.

I have no idea exactly what that will look like.  :)    Not yet, anyway.  But I do know that I have a lot of questions that I want to ask myself, and that my answers will be more significant (and more enduring) if they’re shared.  We’ll just have to see exactly what shape it’ll take!

The First Stone

In the Bible, one of Joshua’s first tasks after taking Moses’s place as leader of the Hebrews is to lead the fledgling nation into the land that God had promised them.  He does this by following the Ark of the Covenant through the middle of the Jordan River, which parts miraculously to allow the entire nation to cross on dry ground.

After they cross, Joshua calls a man from each of the twelve tribes to return to the middle of the river and bring back as a stone from the riverbed.  He erects these stones as “a memorial to the people of Israel forever” of the power of God and His care for His people.

This is only the first of several instances during Joshua’s guidance of stones being raised as memorial’s to God’s involvement in the lives of the Israelites.  Often they are reminders of great miracles done by God; other times they are “witnesses” to promises made by the Israelites themselves.  In every instance, though, the stones are placed to serve as permanent reminders of the ongoing relationship between God and humanity.

Those stones are the inspiration behind this, the ManyStone website.  Whether in my blog or my business, I want everything I do to serve as a “stone,” a reminder of God’s involvement in my life and my covenant of service to Him.  This may (and, I expect, will) take a number of forms, but I hope that at the core of each post, page, and picture is a memorial.