"Agriculture........................"

Last night’s visit to the rescue mission was no great emergence into God’s presence. The room was nearly full with a variety of faces, young, old, black, white, nobody familiar. For whatever reason, it was a crowd of drifters, nobody from the neighborhood at all; and yet, looking into their eyes, I could see the same assortment of personalities that always meet us there. Some smile and shake their head in agreement. Others show deep thought, their brows and their mouths, without opening, expressing a mental digestion process taking place within them. They laugh with us. They “eat” with us. On this occasion, one fellow, inside and out of the heat, seated on a full stomach, succumbed to slumber, his head pressed against the wall and his body upright in the chair. Thankfully, no snoring. I thought it a bit of coincidence when Dave opened up the meeting by taking us to a certain verse in Deuteronomy which had just been brought to my attention the day before by a pastor friend in Alabama. It’s a text that the Jews refer to as the “Shema”, a word meaning “to hear”, but to hear in the sense of “obeying”. To put it another way, the term suggests the possibility of our not just merely receiving verbal transmission audibly, but having the truth of whatever is said to break open unplowed ground and cause fruit to come forth. This isn’t just a matter of ears taking in sound waves, eyes framing whatsoever is in front of them without pondering the truth of what they see. We’re talking “enlightenment” to the point of “reaction”. I might even go one step farther to say: That which is sown into the brain somehow gets into a man’s “belly”, the heart and soul of who and what he is. Jesus called it being “born again”; and, while believers equate such phrase to a re-connecting with God through the Holy Spirit, where we tend to come up short is in thinking it to be a one-time experience. I don’t know about others; but, for me, the initial encounter simply opened the door for multiple reenactments……