"Passing Through....................."

Saturday morning passed with breakfast at Bob’s and a trip with Beth to her hairdresser, the shop belonging to her brother and he giving me a Navy “buzz” while we were there. Returning home, however, she was still very much into rearranging the living room and I was quickly put to work. It was a couple of hours re-hanging pictures and re-positioning furniture, that latter requiring me to mount another ceiling hook for the overhead light, my recliner now in the opposite corner next to the fireplace. By six, the old man was tired. My only reason for driving out to the church was a request delivery of a few things my granddaughter needed, but the evening service the college age group holds in the youth sanctuary held me for a few moments, their worship meeting me in my mood. An inner tug, after a few songs, then took me upstairs to that larger altar area. Seated there on the front row in the pitch-black darkness, only a glimmer of light from outside filtered in through the foyer doors behind me, I sat in silence, my mind preparing a place for two to become one. It didn’t happen. No voice. No merger. Just an inner sense of “being in the doctor’s office”, a knowledge there that, on the other side of some invisible partition, He was listening. There was no disappointment in my departure thirty minutes later. The “kids” were in final prayer. My wife was waiting. The moon filled the night sky, the highway but a concrete ribbon beneath my car as my thoughts remained centered on Him. If Jesus is the “Door”, He is not one with any physical attributes, any image such term brings to us being false, our brain tending to give it substance, a wooden thickness either permitting or denying entrance. It was a veil which separated the inner court from that sacred space into which only the high priest entered once a year, the Mercy Seat there, covering the Ark of the Covenant with God’s presence hovering there above it; and, while that divisor was, indeed, a thick woven cloth, Calvary rent it, opening “a new and living way” for us to access our Creator. Contact is now more like two flames in close proximity to each other, a union achieved at His discretion as we surrender ourselves to such grace. Encounter is a privilege and not to be taken for granted. There is yet “none righteous; no, not one”. In becoming one with Him, though, He brings unto us boldness to approach the throne, the matter more of His making than ours, the “authority” all His and anything else arrogance on our part. So I believe. So I try to live in the next step, each day new to do it all again……