"Interim.........................."

Our visit to the Youth Detention Center Sunday morning was blessed by clear roads, predicted snowfall evidently finding somewhere else to manifest its weather conditions. Two of my group had dismissed themselves due to illness; but, because of the scheduling having been altered, our number merely dropped to six, four of whom would actually share with the kids. The hour went well, the Spirit tying together our thoughts and a theme somehow emerging of our existence here no more than a small slice of infinity we occupy, culture, environment, and history all shaping us into individuals, all of us with a need for the reality of God being much more than something we profess to believe. Several among our congregation listened with tears in their eyes. The six girls would enter into prayer with our women in a separate room after we closed… My pastor, during evening service, would speak to us out of that portion of Scripture where Hezekiah, faced with a prophetic sentence of death, “turned his face toward the wall” and got hold of the Almighty. The message was a good one and I am in agreement with the truth that we all need such connection in our life, our journey down the path a matter of days and weeks filled with drudgery, perplexity, stress, triviality, trauma, and traffic jams. As one fellow put it,: “What kind of person do we become in the math and aftermath of all the fecality slung at us between diapers and Depends?” Faith ought to be more than mental doctrine acquired from the Book, an inanimate totem we worship out of some sense of it gaining us entrance into heaven in the end. Must we all find assurance in the same manner, though? Is it required that each of us be cloned by another’s experience of “hooking up with the Holy Ghost”? For this old man, the “mystery of the Gospel” is verified, not so much by what gets us into God’s presence, but by how much of Him is shown in our walk, manifested in our identity, once we’ve come out of that merger……