Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

by John Eldredge

lost to me as I get sidetracked with, What the blazes is an Ebenezer? Why am I raising one? I don’t think I have one. Am I supposed to? Would I recognize one if I saw it? All the while I’m equally distracted by associations with good old Ebenezer Scrooge, which takes me further off on rabbit trails. This hymn refers to a story from the Old Testament, to one of those fabulous Lord of the Rings–type battles when it looked like Israel was about to be utterly massacred by a marauding army. But God intervened, and he intervened so mightily that the people of God ran their enemies all the way out of the country and then some. The prophet Samuel then “took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us’” (1 Samuel 7:12). The point being, every time an Israelite passed that way again, they would see the stone and remember what God had done, remember how utterly faithful he is.