"Investigation..................."

If the virus floating through our family doesn’t choose me for its next victim, there’s but nine days left before we return to the Youth Detention Center. That’s plenty of time, of course, to collect my thoughts as He filters them through my brain; and no doubt what’s in my basket will change much between now and then. Having missed our visit to the rescue mission Wednesday, though, opting instead to minister to my wife who was suffering as noted above, I find myself still tossing around the Apostle Paul’s statement of the Gospel equating to “the power of God”, seemingly suggesting that, within such commodity, His righteousness is revealed “from faith to faith”. What, then, can be said to convince us that we have indeed encountered the reality of what we preach? Elsewhere, in another epistle, in writing to previously won converts who now seek proof of such matters, he points to himself as being weak “in Him”, but living “with Him” by those four words, and therein establishes for believers to simply examine themselves. Either this confirmation of His resurrection is known unto us or we need to go back to square one and determine whether our conversion went no farther than our head. Maybe all we own is just a theology that never actually got connected to a Holy Ghost who abides in our “belly”. In being so bold as to open that question, however, perhaps I should address what exactly is meant by an encounter with the Truth. Miracles? Healing? Some rending of the heavens and His voice declaring His existence? Surely none of us can demand our own personal experience must be replicated in another. Each of us must be assured for himself, in his own heart. In my own walk there has been, over the course of more than four decades, a dream, a vision, an immersion into His Spirit so deep that there is no denying the osmosis entertained for those few moments in time. Singular events never repeated. Faith to faith. In between, there have been continual returns to the well, however, grace taking me “through the veil” and into the Holy of Holies where somehow all that I am finds the hem of His garment, His presence made known to me only by some tangible merger. The rest is life. Today and tomorrow, facing the world as it comes to me, trusting in the tug on the other end of the anchor-line. This little light of mine. How well, I wonder, does it shine…….