The Ten Commandments

I am doing a project for my Curacy training (which will apparently get me another degree). My chosen title is 'What are you doing when you preach?' which seems a good question to ask. In my reading today I came across this quote which I liked and hence share.

‘In her beautiful novel about Maine, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sara Orne Jewett describes the ascent of a woman writer on the pathway leading to the home of a retired sea captain named Elijah Tilley. On the way, the woman notes a number of wooden stakes scattered about the property in random fashion, with no discernable order. Each is painted white and trimmed in yellow, like the captain’s house. Curious, she asks Captain Tilley what they mean. When he first plowed the ground, he says, his plow snagged on many large rocks just beneath the surface. So he set out the stakes where the rocks lay in order to avoid them in the future. In a sense, this is what God has done with the Ten Commandments. He has set out the stakes where the rocks are. He has said, “These are the trouble spots in life. Avoid these, and you won’t snag your plow’

from John Killinger's ‘To my people with love’