"Birthing.........................."

Mother’s Day was a “divided affair” for me and Beth. With my group scheduled for services with the kids at the Youth Detention Center, she attended early morning church by herself. We came together, afterwards, for dinner with family and friends. Entertainment was watching the “grandchildren”, two of them now of legal age to go with me in ministering at the above facility, laughing and giggling at old photographs my daughter has stored in two huge containers. Sunday evening worship was a solo. Four fractures in her back makes it hard for her to endure the seating for any long period of time. For me, therefore, it’s not unusual, any more, to soak up as much of His presence as possible before just coming home to catch the sermon later on my computer. On this occasion, however, the young man appointed to the pulpit in our pastor’s absence caught my curiosity. Raised in our ranks, his early call to such ministry was strongly rooted in “old-time holiness”, not so much all the legalism that we once endorsed, but definitely a lot of “holier than thou” staining his witness, at least in this old man’s eyes. Marriage and three or four years away elsewhere, though, seems to have softened it somewhat, his last message unto us clearly with God’s anointing, judgment balanced with grace. Now he took us to Jeremiah, the pagan idol, Moloch, and the practice of sacrificing babies in exchange for chasing one’s own desires. My reasoning that he was about to address this nation’s liberty with abortion was slowly enlightened otherwise as he pointed to a Church, deafened by the world’s drumbeat so that it doesn’t hear death’s agony, giving up that which has been divinely implanted within her, while entertaining her own heart rather than hungering for His. “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith;” Paul wrote unto the Corinthians. “Prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?” Each man, each woman, it seems to me, must frequently take that statement into a prayer closet…….