One Year More

One year more than a half a century ago, my life was given its direction.  It was a night unlike any other night I spent in the Alamo Methodist Church parsonage.  It was the night I made an altar out of my bedside, knelt, and accepted Christ as Savior.  In that moment I also heard a call to preach.  Prior to that moment I had no idea about who I was and where I was going with my life.  After that night I came to know I was a child of God and my life was to be ministry.  A verse of scripture also came to me that night. 

 

I should say it was a verse of scripture that leaped off the printed page to be imprinted in my heart.  All these years I have carried it with me.  How it came I can only surmise to be the activity of the Holy Spirit.  At age seventeen going on eighteen, I hardly knew where any verses lay hidden.  To this day I am amazed that I found it, or perhaps I should say, it found me.  The verse is Psalms 118:14 and reads "The Lord is my strength and song, and has become my salvation."  Every Bible ever purchased has those words underlined. 

 

Like any memory that has had that many birthdays, things are not seen as clearly now as they were experienced then.  But, certain things remain more than certain.  I continue to trust in Christ.  I do so out of my imperfect life, but it remains the direction toward which I press on.  And even though I fill no pulpit and pastor no congregation in these days, the call continues to hold my life in place.  The Lord is indeed my salvation.  Temporally and eternally.  In His mercy He gives me the strength to go on and sometimes I even do so singing.  There is only one reason I have any hope of coming to the end of my life thinking that it has not been a wasted trip and that reason centers in this Lord who has loved me longer than there is any memory.