"Expansion...................."

”But he is a Jew which is one outwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter: whose praise is not of men, but God”… Romans 2:29

Less than two years after my father’s unexpected demise, Mom remarried, her husband quite younger than her and the union lasting only long enough for him to gain a college degree. Left with two children to raise while working third shift at the Post Office, she (in her own words) “survived”. The kids were a handful, my half-brother the apple of her eye but always into trouble, his sister evolving into drugs and giving birth to a boy, the father never revealed. My mother then “adopted” him, she being the only parent he knew, the girl’s life becoming a continual migration in an attempt to evade creditors. From the beginning, Josh never had a chance. Love from “Nana” was mixed with the truth of his having been abandoned and her feelings of having been trapped by circumstances forced upon her. Withdrawn and in his own little shell, he drifted into his teens hanging with others likewise rejecting the world around them, dropping out of school, occasional employment to pay for cigarettes, and always returning to his grandmother in need. When she died, the well here in Kentucky was dry. My last contact with him was a picture on Facebook, his physical body pierced and tattooed top to bottom, his comments indicating a journey into Buddhism… Dallas Willard, in “Knowing Christ Today”, addresses pluralism, the idea that, beyond our pension to demand a born-again experience, baptism, tongues, and a handful of other doctrinal dogmas we’ve gathered along the way, final judgment will be a matter of a man’s heart. He examines those verses by which believers eliminate everybody but “the herd”, his theology the same as mine in this particular arena, just not expressed in Pentecostal terminology. When Peter declares “salvation” existent only coming through the name of Jesus, when Christ, Himself, asserts that no man can come unto the Father other than through Him, if we can but accept these statements as pointing to our rescue, our reconnection to the Creator by means of the Holy Ghost now abiding “in” us and not to a Judgment Day rejection of all but my bunch, the Kingdom of God becomes inclusive rather than exclusive, a matter of not just teaching the Gospel, but living it as well. It is the hope I hold for my dad, my mother, Josh, and all I meet……