Remembering Roots

Roots are important.  Roots connect us to life giving sources.  Going back to the place of my birth and rambling around in places familiar to my parents nurtures me in an unexplainable way.  In a like manner my spirit is nurtured by spiritual roots.  My  parents lived lives that were like metal guardrails on either side of a narrow road which stretched out before me.  My early years were filled with small Methodist churches and countless Methodist preachers.  

At Young Harris College I was shaped by its spiritual community and a small group of Christian guys who called me friend.  Asbury College, a school that had "Holiness Unto the Lord" blazoned across the front interior wall of the auditorium, provided a place to hear preachers like J. Edwin Orr, E. Stanley Jones, and Dennis Kinlaw; and, to experience the power of the Holy Spirit in an extraordinary moment of revival during my last quarter.  My spiritual roots were laid down in the social upheaval of the 60's and 70's in south Georgia, a segregated society struggling to move into an integrated world of racial equality.  

I am one who withstood and held to the back of the pew in front of me during many an evangelistic sermon, but finally gave my life to Christ at age 18 in a very emotional experience by my bedside.  While many events and many people have shaped my spiritual journey since its beginning, that bedside moment and the revival at Asbury College sent down deep roots which continue to give my soul its life over 55 years later.  Thanks be to God for His blessings of grace.