More than Treasure

A few years in a moment of downsizing, my mother told me to come get the old cedar chest which had been in our family almost as long as I have memory.  After my father's death when I was seven years old, it became a depository for some of his personal stuff which I would get often get out as I remembered him.  By the time it arrived here I had already retrieved most of the stuff of those memories so that I could keep them with me over the years.  A few weeks ago while plundering through its contents again, I found letters written home from my college days.    

I was amazed they had been kept all these years.  One of those letters was one I wrote a few weeks after the Asbury Revival of 1970.  Tomorrow will mark the fifty-first anniversary of this spiritual moment which radically re-directed my spiritual journey.  The letter was not only a treasure, but felt holy in my hands as I held it once again and read what I had written so many years ago.  It read fresh.  Its words were words of passion.  It brought back to my mind and heart remembrances of how the Holy Spirit swept over, into, and through my heart changing the core of who I would be.   

One of my remembrances of that moment of revival was the way holy power made itself known in the telling of what had happened.  As the telling of the Spirit's work at Asbury College was told, the Spirit came again, rushing into a new place with the same sense of presence and power as we had experienced in the auditorium turned sanctuary where it all began.  And even as I read those words of witness from so long ago, it seemed to once again be happening.