"Evaluation............"

It’s early morning, the house quiet and the world outside slowly escaping darkness, the sun not yet risen above the hills. Covington is just across the river from Cincinnati and we live where the inner city releases its grip, streets becoming roads, this one now an isolated segment of what was once a main route connecting the rural area south of us with industrialized civilization. Farming has all but disappeared. Subdivisions have the main highway just above the creek now bumper to bumper at least twice a day, no traffic light at either end of our two-mile stretch making attempts to enter the flow a bit like the old video game “Frogger”. Much has changed since the fifties. My thoughts are occupied with the passing of time… My group returns to the Detention Center this Sunday, our last visit just ten days ago and me leaving the kids “hanging to a branch” and failing to identify it as the “lifeline” we were extending unto them. In truth, I almost always depart from there feeling less than “finished”, but realizing what we are doing is no more than “sowing seed”, the Holy Ghost really the physician, His presence still operating long after we’re gone. It is that very idea, though, that is on my mind to share with them, picking up right where I left off, how salvation is a journey, one where, in just living, you look back as the years go by, asking yourself what you have accomplished, has there been any purpose to it all. There being nothing we can do about the past, we are left with the person in the mirror, the question not a matter of “How many toys have I amassed?” but “Who am I on the inside? What sort of person have I become?” It isn’t just a matter of divine judgment yet to come, but an on-going self-value assessment that is in us from birth. Worth, however, can only be determined through a relationship with Him…..