"Innersanctum........"

Sunday morning, before church, my wife’s niece spoke with me of having been able to view a 4D sonogram video of her seven-month granddaughter developing in her mother’s womb. Assigning such a label to it is a bit misleading, in my opinion, since the fourth dimension only applies in the sense of the finished product being but a spliced re-run of individual stages. Still, how neat it must be to see life so sequenced from the beginning. On the other side of that perspective, my wife and I sat for four hours this morning with other relatives in a surgery waiting room, the forty-four year old daughter of a different niece, born with only one kidney, trying to survive, through dialisis, the time it takes to hopefully acquire a transplant. Life, it seems to me, is a gift of God, yet an enigma in so many ways, no guarantees, faith a matter of perspective, a lesson to be learned. What church has taught me over the last few decades is, in spite of our holding multiple theologies that obviously can’t all be truth and nothing but the truth, divine purpose in its existence, in the first place, was about our having completely solved the mystery. Fellowship in Christ is a matter of iron sharpening iron, a horizontal flow achieved through surrender of self, not unity in all of us believing the same thing. Admittedly, while the first part of such statement applies to any community of believers, the latter is almost impossible to handle when it concerns sharing a pew with those who don’t see it as you do. If the roots run deep enough, though, if history shared is a memory able to secure the bond, “Holy Ghost glue” takes care of the rest. Birthed into Pentecost and, at this stage of things, about to turn seventy-three in a few days, knowing such change in both “my bunch” and myself, I give thanks for an umbilical cord restored. Somehow that image suggests another “birthing” yet to come. Not sure, though, that I’ll want to see any replay of my own gestation period……