CINCINNATI — It was 1975. There was an 11-year-old girl. And she wanted a Pet Rock.
That youngster was Floretta Barbee-Watkins, who grew up to become a Presbyterian pastor and Deputy Wing chaplain in the U.S. Air National Guard, and is now a social-emotional intelligence coach in North Carolina. Barbee-Watkins preached at the NEXT Church National Gathering on Mar. 3, continuing the question of “What do these stones mean?” from Joshua 4:1-10.
As a girl, Barbee-Watkins wanted that Pet Rock that came in a box with straw and air holes — just as though it was a live pet. She tried to convince her mother. “It would teach me discipline and responsibility,” she pleaded. Her mother said no.
“I would not be denied,” Barbee-Watkins remembered. She would get her own — but without spending her own money. As they left the store, she noticed stones at the base of a small sapling, and picked one up and put it in her pocket. After that, she said she sought out rock siblings for her pet everywhere she went, adding over time to the family.
The rocks stayed in her room, on her dresser, even when she left for college. “What did those stones mean to me?” They meant “I was gonna be cool. I was gonna have something no one else had. … To my mother, they were just dumb.” Looking back, they “represent remembering” — recalling her childhood of love, legacy and laughter.
“Stones have been used by God, and stones have been used against God,” she said. Barbee-Watkins recalled stones in Christian tradition: On Christ the solid rock I stand, she sang. Jacob used a stone as a pillow. The rock is Jesus. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
Stones can also be weapons. She listed examples: heaved at buses intended to provide accessibility and equity to students wanting good schools, stones thrown at protestors.
In the Joshua text, the stones had power, Barbee-Watkins preached. The Israelites were traveling and about to reach the land they had been promised — “land that belongs to somebody else, but that’s another sermon for another time,” she interjected.
“The people of God are called to remember,” Barbee-Watkins said. The text reminds people of faith that “sometimes you gotta go back to the place where you received grace. Or to the places where pain was experienced.”
Again, she asked: “What is calling us to remember? And what do these stones mean?”
Stones carry lessons and a future hope.
“Maybe God is saying that these stones are a memorial to advance our faith to God,” she said. Barbee-Watkins said she imagines God saying: “These stones are designed to cultivate our gratitude.”
After her mother died, Barbee-Watkins gathered up the stone family she had collected, that had lived for so many years on her childhood dresser, and threw the rocks in the backyard, remembering as she did so “the sweet woman who would not give me a Pet Rock.”
As she pulled some stones out of her pocket, Barbee-Watkins concluded saying she still carries stones with her — a reminder of her faith and what grounds her: her love for Jesus Christ.
