Photo and Commentary ©2025 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, June 1, 2025
The noise started before breakfast. A large, unrelenting, aggravating noise. Some heavy equipment was at work, and not too far away. The sound was familiar, yet we couldn’t quite place it.
As I stirred the oatmeal I gave thanks once again that my husband and I are not prone to headaches, because this jarring noise could certainly produce one.
All through breakfast the noise pounded our ears, so we were confident we’d be able to trace the source when we headed out on our morning walk.
And we did. Leaving our cul-de-sac, we turned right and followed the sound to a nearby neighbor’s house. We saw what you see in the photo above, a jumbled pile of broken-up concrete slabs. Out of sight to the left of this photo was a large air compressor, with a cord snaking its way to the backyard.
A fence prevented us from seeing the demolition site, but the mystery was solved. It was a jackhammer that had provided our breakfast background “music.”
As we walked on, a Bible verse came to mind: “Break up the stony ground.” Old Testament? New Testament? Who said that? What was the context?
Upon returning home I was eager to track down that verse. Apparently it doesn’t exist, at least not in those precise words. What I did find was a verse in the Old Testament, Hosea 10:12, New King James Version, God speaking:
“Sow for yourselves righteousness.
Reap in mercy;
Break up your fallow ground,
For it is time to seek the Lord,
Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.”
I checked more than a dozen Bible versions, and most of them spoke of fallow ground. Others described the ground as uncultivated, unplowed, unprepared. None of them spoke of stony ground, so I let go of that word in order to hear what God was saying in this passage.
Reading the whole chapter, and then the chapter before and the chapter after, it’s clear that God’s chosen people kept stubbornly choosing to turn from Him to other gods. “My people are bent on backsliding from Me.” (Hosea 11:7a)
And yet we hear God’s heart yearning for them: “How can I give you up . . . how can I hand you over . . . My heart churns within Me.” (from Hosea 11:8)
When I “mis-remembered” Hosea 10:12 as “Break up the stony ground,” I was probably bringing in memories of other Bible verses that talk about stony ground, such as Matthew 13:5, 6, where the sower’s seeds “fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth,” so the shallow soil couldn’t produce healthy roots.
I must have been thinking, too, of my favorite stony verse, Ezekiel 36:26, where God promises: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
My mind jumbled a batch of Bible verses together, just like that jackhammer produced the jumbled pile of stone pieces. But I’m thankful for the thoughtful path I took through Hosea, Matthew, and Ezekiel. I’m thankful most of all that God is willing to be active in my life, not with the fierce force of a jackhammer, but with a gentler hand of deconstruction and reconstruction. Because it’s time.
“For it is time to seek the Lord,
Till He comes and rains righteousness on you.”