"Stabilization......................"

My niece came to the early morning service yesterday, enjoying it enough to note she would be back next week. I sat there thinking through most of it that, other than the sermon being perhaps a little more emotionally charged, the hour “program” was about the same as the one she left to visit with us. Last night I returned only to hear my grandson sing with his classmates before the congregation, no interest otherwise, knowing beforehand that Ken Hamm was the guest speaker. Entrepreneur of the Creation Museum just a few miles west of here, he’s now accepting donations to help build an amusement park just south of us, one centered around a replication of Noah’s Ark. Seems to me Jim Bakker tried something similar not all that long ago; but, then, this old man often wonders if the years haven’t turned him into that bull frog of whom the pastor speaks every so often. One of Richard Rohr’s statements highlighted by me in “Everything Belongs” suggests that “God comes to us disguised as life”. That speaks to me, especially when he adds “Your life is not about you. It is a part of a much larger stream.” He defines that latter as the Creator and notes that faith has “no need to push the river” because it “trusts the flow”, there being an inner assurance of its divine identity. For me, it is our reconnection to such waters that define our having a “life” rather than merely knowing an existence; and, at the same time, I find it to be quite evident that our having gained the well doesn’t equate to us swimming in its depths on a 24/7 basis. Facing each day with what it brings to us is still "part of the package”. People remain people. Church is yet church. In truth, a better definition for “sanctified”, instead of our being “set apart”, might well be “submerged”, since regular immersions in Him are required if we are to have any hope at all of “sorting out the flesh”. It all start with the guy in the mirror……