"Plumbing...................."

My middle daughter drove from Lexington yesterday for an early celebration of my becoming a septuagenarian, taking me to dinner and just spending some quality time with dad. This Sunday my youngest will, herself, step into her forties and I am proud of all three of my girls, the women they have become, their life in service to Him. None are specifically “in ministry”; but all that they are and all that they do is governed by that inner connection acquired when they were young, indeed maintained as the journey has taken them thus far. My Thursday milestone hit me, I guess, and, after writing Jamie a note of gratitude and love, thinking she was returning home, I drove down our road realizing, for all I knew, this could have been our last time together. Tears ran down my face, but they were flowing from a much deeper source than just my eyes; and it occurred to me, in the middle of it all, that this was the same bond held between me and my heavenly Father. Surely He often weeps in concern for me… I’ve been reading a mixture, the last few days, of Philip Yancey and Richard Rohr. The first fellow is one of my favorite authors, not because he has all the answers, but because he speaks from a perspective of exploring that which he admits to not yet possessing. The other is a current one book meal shared by a priest whose individual Roman Catholic theology hits close to my own thinking for most of the volume. Toward the end, however, he has me shaking my head with his view on “sin”, a topic which, in my opinion anyway, must be “quickened” unto us by the Holy Spirit Himself, a “convincing” established between our conscience and His reality within us; but, then, I see “grace” and “faith” much in the same terms. Salvation is not a set of tenets held. It is an “inner umbilical cord” through which He comes to me as I go……