the beauty of inefficiency

The last week of the summer, my husband and I take our kids camping. We go to a campsite owned by the United Methodist Church in the Catskills. 

We go boating every day, and swimming in the lake if the weather is warm. We play board games in the barn and roast marshmallows over glowing campfire embers. 

Each day, there’s a program offered by a volunteer. Sometimes we participate and sometimes we do our own thing. 

On Fridays, campers have the opportunity to participate in something called Stone Ministry. 

Almost twenty years ago, someone had the vision of creating an open-air stone chapel in the middle of the woods. And so, stone by stone, year by year, they have been building it. 

Each summer, we have the chance to add a stone. 

Here’s how it works: 

We arrived near the site a little early, and our kids put on rain boots (it was a very wet, muddy season) and took two nets and went about catching newts and frogs. When it was time, we squished along the muddy path to Stone Ministry. 

Peter (that’s actually the volunteer’s name, not just a clever pun about rocks) showed us a pile of cornerstones, and each of us got to choose one. 

We washed the stones with water and scrubbed dirt off with hard bristle brushes, then rinsed them again. 

We wrote intentions on them with chalk. (Well, our kids drew pictures).

Then we helped mix the mortar. 

Then one by one, we each smoothed mortar onto a pillar and placed our stones on top. 

I looked around at the thousands upon thousands of stones that had been laid in just this way. And I was struck by the inefficiency of it. 

And the beauty that was present in that inefficiency. 

No, it wasn’t efficient to do all this work with volunteers. But it was beautiful. 

It wasn’t efficient to wash each rock and write an intention on it. But it was beautiful. 

It wasn’t efficient to mix small batches of mortar by hand and lay each rock one at a time. 

But wow. It was beautiful.