"Direction................................."

I finished that “memories of the Navy” book this morning before driving to school, reading in its final pages of an old man’s recollection of salmon swimming inland to spawn in the fresh water lakes of Kodiak. Then, motoring down the expressway, I happened to see a lone, wild goose in flight, headed south for the winter. For whatever reason, my thoughts turned to fish in an aquarium, whatever instinct they possess reduced to nothing more than a contentment to “cruise the tank”, and almost at the same time the old Karl Marx analogy of religion being “the opiate of the masse” ran through my mind. It would be wrong of me, I know, to simply throw that latter fellow’s opinion like a blanket over all of Christianity, but it does seem to me that it might well behoove some of us to take pause and examine what we refer to as our “faith”. While only the individual can really judge the fullness of his own assurance in Christ, yet I wonder how many within the Church at large are merely occupying the perimeters of their particular fishbowl theology, oblivious to His inner tug on the reins, any call of the Creator to “come home”. Human nature makes it easy for our being “saved” to become no more than a fellowship we have joined, a doctrinal membership we have signed. There’s a scene at the end of an old Robert Redford movie that is forever etched in my brain, the words spoken by the elderly fellow fly-fishing in some stream pasted into the front of one of my Bibles. "Eventually all things merge into one”, it begins, "and a river runs through it.” I believe that; and find it sad that so few seem to know the flow……