Sixty Years on the Road

It occurred to me a few days ago that it has been sixty years since I knelt by my bed in a Methodist parsonage and received Christ into my life.  While that moment was not my first encounter with God, it was the one that has carried me through this long journey.  When I was seven years old, my father died which resulted in a conclusion that there had to be a God and there had to be a heaven.  I could not conceive of any other alternative.  At age seventy-eight, I still stand by the conviction of my childhood except now I would not use the words, "had to be."  Instead, I would use the words "there is." 

I was baptized at age nine by a pastor who my mother would later marry and the influence he had on my faith journey could never be measured.  Though baptized I can only confess to dabbling with what it meant to be committed to Christ during my teenage years.  I went to many altars during those years, but nothing really took with holding power until that night in the Alamo parsonage.  I have not made that moment of beginning the whole of my story, but being the beginning, it will always be an important part of it.  

While there are many people of faith in Christ who speak not of a moment of beginning, but of a lifetime of not knowing what it is to live without loving God, we are all somehow mysteriously given a life which can only be described as a new creation.  While there are many who have cast a strong and lasting shadow of influence on our life, there is not one who has worked the miracle of change and transformation as has Christ Jesus.  Like the father of the prodigal son parable, He is the One who enables us to know home.  We were marked with His holiness at conception and though we choose wandering, He waits with patience for us to turn toward the home He has been preparing and holding for us.  I am grateful for both his patience and His grace.