"Code Blue..................."

Our mid-week Bible class examined the Old Testament story of Hezekiah, but the “meat” of our discussion was pulled from a question put forth the night before at an inner city tent meeting that some had attended. “How many here tonight believe themselves to be just as close to God now as they were in the beginning?” the teacher asked before extending the reciprocal. Our subject would be “revival”. Our response to the interrogative brought forth was about fifty-fifty. Our explanations on both sides of the coin filled nearly ninety minutes with the body ministering to the body, some learning that being refreshed, renewed, and recharged doesn’t require anything but a willingness to meet Him at that inner well with the honest truth of our humanity. Indeed, this is the grace that has kept me now for over forty-two years. In my collection of quotes, there is one by a cosmologist who defines his love for astronomy as something that “gets under his skin”, keeps him working days and nights at the sacrifice of sleep, eating, family and friends, something “beyond the love of puzzle solving”, something he calls “anticipation”. While his list of what he gains, what comes to him out of surrendering his life to such pursuit, differs greatly from any that I might offer regarding the center of my universe, we, nonetheless, connect in this idea of “magnetic attraction” (or maybe “gravitational pull” might be a better way of putting it) having never abandoned me since its first day of discovery. Any obstacles occurring along the way, life being life, me being me, have always been able to be taken with me to the oasis and dissolved in its waters. For me, “revival” is a term that ought to be the “good news” preached by the church to those outside its doors, not just four days of “resuscitative cheer-leading”. It implies that one is “dead”, or at least lying there “gone” if the defibrillators fail in their mission……