"Rendezvous.........................."

This past Sunday Beth went with me to the evening service. Her attendance anymore is sparse. Sitting that long in that type of chair isn’t easy when you have four fractures in your spine and are suffering with osteoporosis. We position ourselves near the rear of the sanctuary for two reasons: (1) if it should become necessary to leave, we are not disturbing others; and (2) the worship music anymore, at our age, is a little too loud at times. On this occasion, however, the flow of His Spirit overcame all other distractions and at the end, as the altar area filled with people going forward to pray, she, too, made her way down the aisle expecting to bond with our granddaughter in seeking the hem of His garment. At the outer edge of such mass, however, two or three women took her into their own circle. Almost immediately she stepped into the flow of the Holy Ghost, tears and tongues spanning the gap between heaven and earth, the world around her lost in an assurance of His presence…. My wife is no Bible scholar. She yet wrestles with much change that has come to Pentecost over the last few decades, not so much in recognizing Old-time Holiness legalism held some error within it, but in questioning how theology can evolve. To her, truth is truth. Separating humanity from the message is “confusing” to her. Surrendering herself unto the simple assurance of His reality is not. She was born into this. I was not. My own faith came to me via a “leap” in my living room at the age of thirty, was secured, then, by several other encounters along the way which serve as “anchorage”, points that hold no explanation other than “God”, and continued returns to that fountain of living water such as Beth experienced on this above occasion. The Book is a foundation, a stabilizer, an oasis where He meets me as I go; but it has never held some state of “divinity”. It is infallible only in as much as His honesty sorts out my humanity, a task that has remained, from the beginning, “under construction”. The two of us, it might be said, therefore, are one in Him at that undeniable point of connection. If she doesn’t understand my need to read, to purge religion from where two thousand years has taken the Church, it’s just as much the same where I sit, wondering how anyone can simply “believe” without investigating their propensity to follow Jim Jones down to Guyana. To each their own. He “seals the deal” and is never far from those who would seek His promise manifested and confirmed…….