Monday, February 21, 2022                                      (today’s lectionary)
Transferring trust to Jesus
The wisdom from above is first of all pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without inconstancy or insincerity.
All afternoon we sat in an overcooled conference room next door to our apartment. Several of us attended Grace Covenant Church’s membership class. Led by Pastor Ray, we sorted through doctrines, budgets, and this and that, and we also listened to each other’s stories. When did we “transfer our trust” from ourselves to Jesus? Or at least, when did we get started on that lifelong task?
Our stories took us back. To heart surgery before kindergarten, to parental legalism in grade school, to bullying in middle school, too much family responsibility in high school, and confusion in college.
The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for those who cultivate peace.
I told two stories. In 1976 after a week at the Creative Community Project’s Boonville Ideal Ranch, fifty or sixty of us marched around the Chicken Palace singing “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” at the top of our lungs, and something changed inside me. I transferred some trust. God was near. God was inside my heart, like Sunday School teachers had told me He was since I was four years old.
In the next few weeks the colors were brighter, the food tasted better and it was a joy to sit in circles, break our sandwiches in half, and share them with each other. I learned to pray out loud at the top of my lungs at 5:30 in the morning and love it. Soon I learned that I had become a member of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, or in American slang, the “Moonies.” Creative project indeed.
For two years that group helped me change my life. Then I left and in 1979, back home in Lincoln, Illinois, I joined a Lutheran Kogudus retreat. At a similar retreat three years earlier, my dad’s faith was rekindled. His life with Jesus became more important to him than anything else. His workaholism abated, and he became a peaceful, smiling man who was a joy to be around. His farming required hard work and dedication, but he no longer sulked about it. He became an elder in his small Lutheran church.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
I said goodbye to Margaret and my family and drove two hours north to Matthiessen State Park near Ottawa, Illinois. Thirty or so of us settled in for the January weekend. We divided into groups, sang, and listened to talks on the Apostles’ Creed. While we were sleeping the snow fell, and it kept on falling. We were cozy in our cabin, but by Sunday morning over twenty inches of snow had closed every road. We decided to extend our retreat an extra day.
On Sunday afternoon the snow stopped. I took a walk in the pathless woods just outside. I walked into those woods thinking about the first verses of Hebrews. Prompted by a family bible study, I had been arguing with the author of Hebrews since leaving the Moonies four months earlier. Each week the pressure inside me grew.
Our Savior Jesus Christ has destroyed death and brought life to light through the Gospel.
Jesus could not be God! “… through whom he made the universe … the radiance of God’s glory … the exact representation of his being … the Son sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”
Something changed inside me on that walk. Just as in the Chicken Palace three years before, I transferred trust to Jesus. I walked into the woods convinced Jesus was not God, and I walked out certain that he was. That certainty has never left me.
Jesus said, “Everything is possible to one who has faith.” And the boy’s father cried out, “I do believe, help my unbelief!”
I tell this story over and over, and I told it again at our membership class yesterday afternoon, forty-three years later. I am so thankful for that story. A few months earlier I had met Margaret, soon after getting back home to Lincoln, and she had been trying to get away from me ever since. I was not her idea of a husband. I told her what happened in the woods. She joined her happiness with mine, and our time together began to change.
I began to change. And although she took a few days to make up her mind for sure, when I proposed marriage to her a few months later, she said yes.
(James 3, Psalm 19, 2 Timothy 1, Mark 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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