"Cleansing........................."

“I often say that I don’t worry about the meaning of life. I can’t handle the big stuff. What concerns me is the meaning in life, day by day, hour by hour, while I’m doing whatever it is that I do. What counts is not what I do, but how I think about myself while I’m doing it…” Robert Fulgham

Unforeseen circumstances kept me at home Sunday evening, watching the latter part of our church service on the computer. Such broadcast doesn’t set well with me, the maintaining of it changing our identity in several ways, but I must concede that, at times, it has allowed me to worship from afar. In that sense, the ability to reach our shut-ins, the elderly and the hospitalized, balances that which, in my opinion, is negative. On this occasion, with our pastor away again, two young men had been appointed to fill the pulpit. It was an interesting sermon. The first fellow drew from his experience as a basketball coach and admonished the congregation to “defend their house” and the second, the son of a close friend lost to breast cancer a few years back, followed with a Biblical recipe for “offense”. There is no denying that, together, it was a potent message. Within it, though, was an old-time Pentecostal perspective demanding this “separation from the world”, that which was seen as “setting us apart” being a matter of “material circumcision”, what folks in our bunch refer to as “hanging a clothesline”. While, undoubtedly, there is much that we could excise from our existence and be better off without it, over four decades of “holiness” has taught me humanity’s problems run deeper than external influence and, there is any hope of healing us of who and what we are, more can be accomplished with a mirror showing us our need of knowing Him at a greater depth. When little stirs us enough to answer altar calls, it’s time to investigate the plumbing, not so much the state of the ark around us……