This is an excerpt from my book, Tumbled People: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Your Faith.
When I was little, my family lived in the small town of Aromas, California, with a population of 717 at the time. Later, I always joked that when my family moved, they had to change the sign to 712. The town had one main street with one store: Dolan’s Market, operated by Dolan himself. Next to Dolan’s were two gas pumps run by the town drunk. We also had a fire station where teens smoked, a Baptist church where teens repented, and a K–8 school I attended from first grade through fifth grade. It was the perfect place to be a kid; we ran wild for hours among the oak and eucalyptus trees. To this day, the spicy smell of eucalyptus takes me right back to Aromas and those happy days.
Both sets of my grandparents lived in other states, so I developed the habit of adopting my older neighbors as grandparents. Mr. Hansen was one such lucky man. He and his tiny wife lived directly across the street from me and my two rambunctious siblings. I’m not sure how they felt about us when we moved in and disturbed their peace, riding our Schwinn banana-seat bicycles up and down the road and catching blue-belly lizards on their property, but Mr. Hansen was nice to me.
I have only a few memories of Mr. Hansen. He wore baggy clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. He occasionally invited my family to the pancake breakfast at the Grange, and he liked to putter about on his property. But the thing I remember most about Mr. Hansen was his love of rock tumbling. In a small wooden shed next to his house, he had a workshop where he would tumble rocks in a large metal cylinder. It was a loud machine. There, the contents of the cylinder would transform from ordinary-looking rocks to smooth and shiny works of art, which he then used to make beautiful jewelry.
Occasionally, when I would watch him work, Mr. Hansen would give me one of the rocks and tell me its name. I had a round metal tin with painted flowers on top that may have once contained cookies but now housed my beloved rock collection. I loved to sit alone in my room, pry off the lid, and feel each smooth rock in the collection, remembering what Mr. Hansen had told me about it. Some weren’t even rocks but were petrified wood, which fascinated me to no end. I would wonder at their colors, patterns, stripes, and dots and at the hidden pictures within the rocks. One of my treasures had the perfect outline of a donkey’s face, while another was shaped like a star.
Lately, I’ve been sharing the joy of tumbled rocks with my grandchildren. It turns out rock tumbling is much more complicated than I thought. There are four different sizes of gritty sand the rocks have to be tumbled in, and the whole process takes about a month for one batch of rocks.
When I put that first batch into the tumbler, I looked forward to prying off the cap after the first week. I must tell you, the rocks came out in a disgusting gray goo, as zillions of tiny bits of rock had been knocked loose and ground to dust, creating an ugly paste. But after I rinsed off the sludge, I could see the beautiful change taking place in the rocks. After each week of tumbling, the sand had done its work: the rocks became increasingly smooth. Finally, after the last week of fine sand, the rocks were transformed into smooth, beautiful pieces of art. The inner beauty of the rocks had been revealed.
Life is a similar process. We don’t even have to try to get smoothed out; life does the tumbling for us. We can learn from and cooperate with the process, becoming beautiful, smooth works of art; or we can resist, crumble, and break, gumming up our lives and the lives of others with bitterness and anger. The choice is ours.
Our world is in great need of smooth stones: beautiful people who have learned through the difficult periods of life how to be, how to love, how to create places of peace, and how to engage in compassionate action. The world does not need more rough rocks, leading the way with their sharp edges that gouge and hurt. Instead, it needs mellow souls who can usher in a new era of love and compassion.
How do we help heal the hurting world we live in? How do we help those on the margins, the poorest of the poor, and the displaced? I believe we help heal the world through action that flows from contemplation. But how can we do that? First, or at least concurrently, we welcome the “grinding” aspects of life that heal us and refine us. We must allow the difficult periods of life to transform us, not crush us. We must learn to listen to the Spirit of the Holy, who longs to heal us and to guide us in this process.
I’d love to hear how you are learning from your tumbles!
- Photo at top by Alexander Grey on Pexels.com
- Photo of girl and grandma by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
- Photo of polished rocks by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com
- Photo of heart hands by ATC Comm Photo on Pexels.com