"Destination.................."

Stopping at Half-Price Books Tuesday brought me face-to-face with four different books by the particular author I was exploring, none of which being his one discussing “Open Theism”. There, on a table on the aisle end of the shelves, however, lay what appeared to be a brand new volume by Keith Ward (unfamiliar to me), the title “God: A Guide for the Perplexed” catching my curiosity and its price (six bucks) agreeable to my wallet. The jacket blurb defined the writer as a professor of divinity, an English Anglican priest whose work straddles the boundaries between philosophy, religion, and science. That all suggests to me someone wading around in the universal ether, lost in the deep space of where a man can go in this; but, in a hurry to rejoin Beth at Sam’s, I paid the clerk, thinking later, after reading the first few chapters, another container of raspberries put into my wife’s cart might have been a better choice. Starting with early humanity’s belief in divinity defined by totem poles, sacrificial altars, and mythical titans, the theologian, however, also fed me enough hint of Holy Ghost to capture my hope of meeting the Holy Ghost somewhere ahead. For example, he pens in chapter two his own opinion that encountering God in a “tangible” way is an experience, although beyond all human thought and understanding, possible for everyone to attain, albeit temporal and fragmentary. This has long been my own message. Wednesday evening, just as I pulled up in front of the rescue mission, a couple of last minute phone calls revealed to me that Frank and I could possibly be the only two sharing with the men at Fairhaven. Tony declared himself trapped at work, eventually arriving in time to be handed the last ten minutes or so and final prayer; but God, as usual, weaving it all together into one message delivered by three vessels and the Holy Ghost. No thick, heavy witness of His presence was there with us in that room. Each of us spoke within the framework of who we are as individuals. Somehow, though, “baskets, dreams, Lord of the Rings, and a young boy in the temple crying out “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth” became anointed enough to draw a bunch of grizzled, old men around a campfire burning in our midst. No coup counted afterwards. Verification found seed, not just sown, but received by the soil before us in abundance. Drunkards? Dregs of society? How about “people”, people with souls just like you and like me, their lives different from mine only in the circumstances of their journey thus far. Church! We had church last night, about twenty-five of us, our congregation and us made one in Him…..