Daily Lesson for May 11, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 78 verse 15:

He split the hard rocks in the wilderness *

and gave them drink as from the great deep.

The summer before my (second) senior year of college and then the summer after, I guided backpacking trips in the San Juan Mountain Range of Southern Colorado.

One of my favorite things to do was to make what we called an Indian sauna. We took rocks from the river bed, heated them in a fire for several hours, then put them in a hole dug at the center of the staked and sealed bottomless tent we called a fly. After that we all got into the fly, and then poured cold water on the rocks, creating a steamy sauna that was the best thing in the world four or five days into a 25-mile wilderness trek.

One thing we had to be careful of, however, was not picking rocks that had been too close to the river. Though you couldn't see, and wouldn't have guessed it, all the rocks had water buried inside them. And under pressure from the heat of the fire the water in the rocks would boil, and the rocks would fissure and burst. It could be dangerous!

There is water buried deep in every, hard place and hard heart. It's water buried there from who knows how long ago -- maybe since the beginning of time. But heat and pressure draw it out. The rock bursts. The rock-hard heart bursts.

Who would have known that water was in there, buried so deep inside. Who would have known, even the stones have tears.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.