Homeland, Ca.
Just down highway 74 on the left is a little two year old church meeting in a 50 year old building. It’s 20 minutes from my house. I had agreed to come on a Sunday morning a month ago, and I completely forgot about it the day I was supposed to be there. So I made time to reschedule on my official calendar.
I wasn’t expecting too much. It was part of getting the word out about “The Gathering” coming up Sept. 12. There might have been 60 people there. But the presentation was maybe the best for me in years! Not because of new songs but rather the fresh thoughts I have had that went with the old songs.
“you all have at least one person in your life that you can call to mind” I said at midpoint in the set. “who asks you for favors all the time… but when you ask for a little of their time they don’t have it”. “well that is my relationship with God” I said flatly. My prayers are all about him helping me move my plans around and him doing things for me” but when he asks me to wait a little or follow his instructions, I really don’t want to! “
“I believe the ‘angels’ we entertain unaware might be the ugly people who irritate us most, the ones that force us to do what God asks”. I sang “you keep me coming back” with a whole different light on it.
There was a freshness about my attitude that I cannot explain except that I have been through enough uncomfortable places in my own relationships lately that I found a new insight and it poured forth from somewhere outside myself. it was as fresh a perspective as I might have ever had in my life, based on experiences in recent hours.
I told a joke about asking my mom to beat me cause when she stopped it just felt so good. And Sunday I felt that way. Really good after a fresh beating, the feelings of my own moral inventory left me “rotoruetered” to the point that maybe my soul was completely free of any sanctimonious rust and religious white wash.
I wish you could have been there to see that pillar of cloud by day. I wish I could manufacture that fresh manna so that I might parlay it into a lasting career of effectiveness too. But such will not happen and maybe never the same way again because that is the God I know. Never does the same thing twice the same way. I can’t imagine how it could have been better.
K So there’s that…. Bryan d