Evolution

Sunday 12/18/2011 4:13 AM

When describing my spiritual journey I often say that my faith has moved from my head to my heart to my hands.  It has been a slow and sometimes painful process.

As a child I was raised in a Christian home, went to a Christian school and went to a church where we attended catechism.  From my recollection I learned nearly everything there was to know about God.  I knew he was loving, wise, omniscient, omnipresent, faithful, sovereign, holy, just, etc.; but it was an intellectual knowledge that helped me do well in catechism and pass my tests in Bible class.  It had little or nothing to do with the way I saw and interacted with the world and other people.  As a result, I saw my faith as a bunch of rules that needed to be obeyed and, if I did it well enough, I would eventually go to heaven.

In 1994 when I first began to study the bible daily, with the expectation that God was going to speak to me personally, I discovered the attributes I had learned about God throughout my life were real.  I experienced the holiness and power of God that literally made me turn my face away when he came near.  I experienced the justice of God as I wept while looking over a city filled with urban decay where fellow human beings trapped by addictions were living on the streets.  I was troubled when faced with the lives of my students who came from homes where their parents didn’t love them or they became trapped due to no fault of their own.  The attributes of God that had been neatly tucked away in my brain began to slowly affect the way I saw the world and its inhabitants and I found that I was crying much more often.  My faith was moving from my head to my heart.

Eventually this new perspective caused me to begin to intervene and try to do something concrete to alleviate the pain I saw around me.  I began to share my hope in God with my students as the opportunity arose and I began visiting a local prison, to encourage a young man who was incarcerated there.  It seemed that my faith was moving again, this time from my heart to my hands.

One thing that frustrates me is the slow progress of it all.  For whatever reason, it has taken me fifty-six years to come to this point and I wonder about all the missed opportunities for service.  I feel a little like Oskar Schindler did at the end of the movie Schindler’s List.

Today my scripture reading includes 2 Corinthians 3:14-18, “But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read.  It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away.  Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.  But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.  Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”  I see my early years of head knowledge and rule-following as the old covenant; my mind was dull and there was a veil covering my heart.  When I finally turned to God he took that veil away and has been slowly transforming me into his image with ever-increasing glory.  From the description given here it sounds like it is a process, not an event, so I should trust that God is superintending that process as he sees fit.  My devotional book also provides some assurance, “It takes a long time for the person of today to close the wings of his intellect and to open the door of his heart.”  I pray that I will have the grace to cooperate with his transforming Spirit rather than hindering his progress.