It was an amazing stone store! Every room sparkled with the God-sewn light that leapt from a myriad of minerals sheltered in glass cases. The rooms were beautifully lit with spotlights to enhance the beauty, although the specimens shone on their own so remarkably, really without the need for any “stage-lighting”.

Then I went to the back of one of the display areas and found lovely velvet-covered boxes filled with what seemed to me to be a multitude of sad gray flat stones. I quickly passed by them several times wondering why a store with such highlighted pieces of the Lord’s grand creation would include these stones that could only be good, I thought, for skipping across a pretty river while counting the number of daps before it sank. Perhaps they had just included in their collection these little impulse items to delight the children who would visit.

I left amazed over how the Lord paints with His Light upon such unyielding petrified things—except for the puzzling common gray rocks, of course!

Later that day I brought two friends with me to see the marvels I had found. These were people who really knew such brilliant stones by their classifications; and they knew how to cut and polish them, as well.

I was utterly dumbfounded when the first place that they lingered in the whole massive collection was over the display boxes of the gray stones! I watched them pick them up and with great fondness turn them over in their hands. I honestly wondered if this was just a sentimental throwback that they were experiencing over some childhood camping experience. I had seen nothing striking after many times of passing by the ordinary pebbles and rocks in those trays. I was even a bit annoyed by their inclusion in such a collection. And here were my ever-so-wise friends coddling them with great intensity of concentration.

I asked them if they were making a joke to humor me, that perhaps I had mentioned the peculiar rocks in such a museum-like atmosphere. They kindly called me over, and encouraged me to linger, rather than flying by expecting every piece of beauty to be immediately there on the surface for me to find with no effort at all.

Cradled in the palms of my friends’ hands were lights of unfathomable glory. The gray rocks were shot through with sapphire blue, earthy oranges, the green of a peacock’s feathers, pinks of such delicacy that I couldn’t imagine a rock displaying it, and a gold I had only seen at the most vivid sunsets.

Then my friends welcomed me to look closer and mysteriously imbedded in the supposed common gray rocks I found designs of the most ecstatic kind that were drawn by the One who is the Maker of all. I saw two seabirds winging their way home to an illuminated sunset cliff. An opening of a cave made by dancing yellow stripes of light dazzled upon a surface. One held a whole firmament of opalescent stars. A complex nest with intersecting twigs presented itself to me with the most gorgeous mother bird sitting atop it with heavenly flashing beryl eyes. On one a lion had left a fiery paw print in the oozing earth. A masked Kingfisher sat perched in the gilded sunset of a blooming tree. I saw an enraptured cellist playing praise music to roll throughout the cosmos. A river stretched through a dark land suffusing it with bursting fertility at the river’s edges and illuminating outward. I saw the Cross looming over the world like a robed Jesus with His arms outstretched running to embrace us. Clouds of vermeil and turquoise mounted into the heavenlies as a pair of praying hands released them.

Oh! I lingered long after my friends left finding myself struck to the core by my previous aimless lack of appreciation for the magnificent rocks. I now knew them as the erupting and stirring Labradorites—my favorite of all the minerals for what they taught me that I thought I already knew. They had been handed to me as a kind of prayer from the hands of my friends who urged me to really look at what was before me, to know that real beauty ignites and expands from the inside out.

It was about the glorious painting of the Lord upon His universe that I learned from the Labradorites, but I also knew that it was an even deeper teaching that was coming from the formerly gray common rocks that I had passed over in my search for easy glitter.

It reverberated through my heart, as though the rocks were crying out as Jesus said they could in the Gospel of Luke. The passage came to me straight from the Biblical red cherished words of Jesus: “…Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it (not take care of them) to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” Matthew 25:45 (parenthesis mine)

Lord, are the Labradorites showing me that not one person formed by your hand is like a common gray rock to be overlooked—that not one is lackluster? Have I failed to be astounded by Your image in those around me? Have I often just looked at the surface for the easy and superficial tinsel? If there is one that I might see as least, shouldn’t I be dazed by the fiery light that is You within that one, if I would simply pause in amazement?

My heart leapt by the adventure prepared for us to find Christ in each person as I had found whole worlds hidden in a lifeless thing—a stone! As I had poured over the stones to find ethereal colors and supernatural stories, weren’t these also within those whom I meet just waiting for someone to appreciate them for the beauty that might seem locked-away to the hasty eye? There waiting was Jesus Himself!

The surprising colors that I found in the rocks would be only the beginning of this thrilling attention to His Presence in His own people! The sapphire blue that I found in the rocks would be the glint of an eye focused on the eternal horizon of heaven’s brooding love over us. The earthy oranges would be the clay of our dearly treasured common humanity in Christ as He moves always in transformation with us. The peacock greens would be the tenacious hope of Spring’s growth in each life. The delicate pinks are the exposed heart of one speaking louder than any rock ever could about the forgiving love of the Savior. Each person, when held by the love of Jesus shines golden, warm, passionate and bright just like the fire off the stones when they are really seen. All the colors on the Labradorite enlivened the real lesson for me.

The next step with the stones was to see the amazing depictions emanating from the supposed drab surface. Hadn’t I seen there the creation in its broad display of wonder? The stones had told me stories about the ways of the birds, about caves of light, about the sky’s ballet of glittering stars, about praise music ringing throughout the firmament, about life giving rivers and prayer-filled clouds that mounted upward, and I had seen the Crucified and Resurrected embrace of the Savior walking abroad emerging from those unspeakable stones.

If such things were painted upon the stones as they cried out to me, what miracles awaited me upon His own children, as I was prayerfully present to in no way ever miss Him, as I had with the gray rocks that I had disdained!

Lord, this is my prayer, to be as present to You on the streets, at my work and my play, in my home and church, to see You next to me on the city bus, or at a concert. May Your fiery light in Your people be so attractive to me that I would be as much an explorer in finding it as those who go to the very ends of the earth, although I may be just at a common street corner. May I long to find it even when the earth’s dirt and smudge causes it to be so dark, so obscure that it would seem not to be there at all.

There was a new word coined in mineralogy for the ways with light of my favorite stone and it is Labradorescence. That is a word for a rock. I wanted a newly made word--one from my heart, because of what the stones had cried out to me? It came from this Scriptural passage: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which translated means, God With Us.” Matthew 1:23 And He is always with us—in the very center of our humanity--always shining His light, beckoning from each heart held by Him to ignite them for His glory! What a dazzling eternal pilgrimage of His Light— Immanuel-escence!