Stone Walls

In New Hampshire, U.S.A., dry stone walls line every country road. Every field and forest is outlined by these walls or the tumbled remains of walls. Even high on rugged, wooded hillsides, the walls stretch along through the trees. “Why”, the visitor asks, “did people build walls everywhere?”


The New Hampshire farmer certainly did not want to build the walls. Unfortunately, two centuries ago, the soil of New Hampshire turned up large granite stones every year. During the transition from a snow-covered-field to the mud of spring, the frost would heave the granite chunks, some the size of a fist, some hundreds of pounds in weight, to the surface, where they presented a very real danger to the precious steel of the farmer’s plowshare. The plowshare was a knife-like blade, made of the the finest steel, whose purpose was to cut through the grass and soil, so that the moldboard of the plow could then turn the furrow over. The plowshare had to be hammer-welded by a blacksmith to the moldboard, an expensive and time-consuming task. High-quality steel was also not readily available, there were no steel foundries. Each blacksmith was a guildsman, trained in the forging of steel. However, the steel required for the plowshare needed the same properties as the finest sword steel – hard, but not to shatter; take an edge, but not to chip; flex, but not to remain bent. Not every blacksmith could produce such fine steel. So each large stone represented a serious economic threat to the farmer.

Before plowing a length of the field, the farmer would need to walk the area to be plowed, inspecting it for stones. Any large stones he found would be loaded on a sledge, pulled by his draft animal. Once the sledge had a full load, the farmer would have his horse drag the loaded sledge to the nearest edge of the field. Not wanting to have the stone take up valuable space for crops, the stones were laid in a single row at the field boundary. The next crop of stones was placed upon these, and so a wall grew. A wall was not intended, it was simply rock-storage, nevertheless, a wall, or stone fence, it became. In later years, as the fields grew more crops than rocks, the stone walls were seen as boundary markers, a way of distinguishing the farmer’s land from the town roads or common land, or the walls represented fences, preventing animals from straying onto your planted fields or your neighbor’s land. The singular use of rock storage was forgotten.

The story of these walls and their construction provides a useful, to me, analogy for the believer’s walk with God. The Holy Spirit reveals to me each day, if I am attentive to His presence, symbolic stones of all shapes and sizes in my life – thoughts or actions in the world of the will, the mind, or the emotions – that have now surfaced to interfere with my walk with God. I do not need to dig for these stones, the Spirit will expose them to me. Then I call upon the Spirit to provide me with the strength and determination to move them out of my life. Some are easier to move than others. Some are bigger than others. None are too big for God to move.

Once placed upon the wall, those stones may be always visible to observers at the perimeter of the field, but they will no longer be my concern; for they cannot stunt whatever small good is growing in the field of my daily walk with God.