as a shadowed pool of mists and more.
I've been tossed in your raging torrents
and lapped on your slower peaceful shores.
Time, from futures uncertain you've created to last
more enduring than diamond the unchangeable past.
Beginning. Beginnings begun.
I have a friend who, in his forties, shared with me the story from when he was a teenager. He went with his father to a Wednesday evening men's prayer meeting at the Baptist church their family used to attend. He was the only teenager among a group of men ranging in age upwards from their twenties. The prayer meeting ended with an invitation to come forward and make a commitment to surrender one's life to Jesus. To him it seemed the invitation continued unduly long. He began to have a nagging suspicion that this lengthier invitation was being done so that he would come forward.
In telling the story, he gave a little half-laugh, and said that he went forward. His father proudly accompanied him as he did so. He said, "Y'know, I had no business going forward at that time because I had no idea what I was doing, except that I had pleased my father in doing so."
In concluding the story, he reflected with somberness, "Still looking back over all the years that have passed since then and my later commitment to my current faith in God through my belief in the saving grace represented by the Christ of the cross, I cannot say that my going forward that evening was not significant in shaping my life and in my adopting my current religious faith."
I have often wondered about the roots of what I have come to adopt as my own belief system, especially the fact that I have come to adopt a theologically-centered weltenshauung. I have a memory similar to my friend's. I was still in grade school, I went forward at the altar call at the end of a Sunday morning service in the Holiday Park Baptist Church. This resulted in my getting dunked in the baptistry a Sunday shortly after that. Reflecting on these as one connected event, I feel that I had no more business having gone forward and having gotten baptized than did my friend in going forward at the prayer meeting. Much of the life that I have lived between then and now reflected a person more at war with God than one who believed a loving relationship with God was possible.
Still, as was the case with my friend, I cannot say now that God was not faithful to what that event should have meant to my life nor that that those moments had no effect in shaping the faith that drives my life now, almost 50 years later.
