I love Super Bowls. I don’t watch them. I know absolutely nothing about football. But I love rocks and Super Bowl Day is a great day for rock stealing.

Well, okay, for the sake of political correctness – perhaps not “stealing.” Re-locating.

One of my greatest joys living in the Texas Hill Country was rock acquisition trips. A couple of kind ranchers gave me keys to their gates and permission to drive into their pastures to get rocks. Super Bowl days were the best because I could load the pickup truck so full that the tires squashed nearly flat and the bumper was only inches from the pavement and I could drive home at twenty miles an hour (because the front of the truck was floating) without causing a traffic jam. Texans love their football, and my poor over-loaded truck would be virtually the only one on the road.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of getting into trouble for toting rocks. My mother would say, “Quit picking up those rocks. When you drop one on your toes, don’t come crying to me.” Without fail, I disobeyed my mother and kept carting rocks around. Without fail, I dropped one on my toes. But I never went running to my mother with my tale of woe. I sat in the backyard alone cradling my foot and crying until it quit hurting.

Why do I love rocks so much? I don’t know. I can lean against a rock building with my face and palms against the rocks and listen to them sing. When I do rockwork, I never break a rock. I spread the rocks out where I can see them easily, then I pick each one for the size and shape of the available space. A jigsaw puzzle built with rocks.

But there is One Rock above every other rock. Psalm 28:1 declares, “To You I will cry, O LORD my Rock.” Psalm 27, my favorite since childhood, says, “He shall set me high upon a rock.” I always felt safe when I read that Psalm even though I was raised as an atheist and had no idea what the words meant. Psalm 91:1 enjoins, “Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.”

I know now that Jesus is The Rock upon which our lives should be built so they will last through the times of trial and trouble. Perhaps the reason I hear the voice of the rocks is found in Isaiah 51:1, “You who seek the LORD: look to the rock from which you were hewn.”

I’ll probably never know who won this year’s Super Bowl, but I will spend the day dreaming about stealing – I mean re-locating – rocks.

http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Parker-McKean/e/B00BOX90OO/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0