Grow up evangelical and you’ll not avoid the revival meeting. (You’ll also be familiar with this booklet). Still, however you view it, Holy Spirit or hypnosis, or somewhere in between, there is a kind of electricity that builds and spreads, not unlike a fueled Grateful Dead concert. But I don’t disparage. For some, perhaps many, it’s life-altering. This was not quite that.
Sunday Evening Revival Meeting and a Short Train
Bodies were swaying as in a gale of grace. It looked like a storm of intimacy: shining faces like flares of mercy, arms embracing under a hail of forgiveness. And you, from your drifting raft, raised your hand, moved down the aisle and knelt at the altar.
An usher handed you a booklet of spiritual laws — precisely four. Jesus was there, and the Holy Spirit, plus the Father, all three of them drawing diagrams with arrows and crosses, drafting a plan for your life.
God the Father assumed the pen and drew a really short train: just two cars, plus an engine he called, Fact. He drew you as a stick man sitting on the engine and wrote in a bubble: You Have Entered Into A Personal Relationship With Christ.
The storm had passed, and you were hoping to talk to one of the counsellors, maybe a spiritual mentor, or even the usher; but his head was on some kind of swivel and he was talking over you, and his finger was stabbing at the car labeled, Faith, telling you to get in.
But you were in the caboose named, Feeling. Tending an old wound, longing for an exit, and yearning for something you couldn’t define. Still, this small dawning: how you had raised your hand, knelt at the podium, not for heaven, really, not even for Christ, who you’d just met, but for some genuine human connection.
Yes! Yes! Thank you.
And thank you, Liane.
So genuine. Probably similar to many who have walked the aisle. Lord help us not to be like the usher, but to proffer true connection.
Thank you for that, Valerie.
All is flawed and yet still there is His grace and mercy.
Lovely way to put it, thank you, Marcia.
Seems that end car might have been
the quieter section
a nice place to sit
for tea and sandwiches 🙂
Ha! Thanks Tamara.
Though disparaged in the rational-thinking world, Feeling has a powerful way of revealing the truth, doesn’t it? I’d forgotten this little booklet, though I never quite took to its message. Thanks, Stephen.
It does indeed. As for the booklet, I think even its author, Bill Bright, has taken back its message. Thanks, Ann.
Thoughtful and reflective, Steve. Someone said they wanted a “Jesus with skin on.” Jesus himself said, “Love one another – this is how people will know that you are my disciples.”
Thank you, Sam. So true, there is no relaying of revelation without bodies.