Mystery and Grace

It has been a long journey.  A lot of miles and years have been traveled since that Tuesday morning at Asbury College when the Holy Spirit broke in upon everything that was normal.  I have always been grateful that I was present in those days.  Asbury was a place to which I went kicking and screaming.  Like Jonah I ran to a different place before finally choosing to go where I knew God was leading me.  Had I stayed the course of my own rebellious spirit, I would have missed out on one of the most life shaping spiritual moments of my journey with God.

 

For some who managed to stand in the distance as observers, it surely seemed that it was a moment when emotions got the better of people.  And indeed as the altar filled time and time again, there were people weeping, and shouting, and even laughing.  I was one of those who knelt at the altar during those hours and I was one who rose never to be the same again.  After those days, I could no longer be content with just getting by, mediocrity in my spiritual journey, and being where I was.  It was hunger and thirst for more of God that pulled me to that altar and that hunger and thirst has carried me forward through a lifetime filled with times of joy and times of darkness.

 

In those days I came to a deep awareness of the power of the Holy Spirit.  It was the beginning steps of a life that would lead me to an unfolding understanding of what it meant to belong completely to God.  In the excitement of the beginning, there was a sense that I had somehow arrived, but the further I walked the more I realized that arriving was never really the destination.  What was important was going in obedience to the direction of the Holy Spirit.  Even though I came to a new awareness of the presence and  power of the Holy Spirit in those days, it is also true that what seemed so clear in earlier days is now more filled with holy mystery and impossible to understand grace than I could ever have grasped in the beginning.