Seeing back…

Sublime memories on a peaceful night outside Hewnston… A dozen years, or more? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a bygone age—one’s faith could fail and believe that a wave may never crest again. America and her loudest churches in the early millennium, it was a very crazy and nervous pit to be in. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, for the lost in the long run.

There is no explanation, no folder of news clippings synced with dated letters and shared memories that can touch that higher sense of knowing that we and God were alive together in that whirlpool of history… or whatever that history meant to those who never did have the opportunity to hear or know.

A fallen prophet once wrote that, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired [read: elected or chosen] bullshit.” But even without putting trust in any one history, it is entirely possible to know right from wrong, God from the enemy, His quiet plan for tas pantas from our loud “history of greatness<sic>…”

Further, it is entirely Scriptural to know that every now and then the whole energy of a generation can bolt, at once, for reasons history cannot explain why it ever happened, either then or in retrospect disbelieving history could ever come close to repeating itself.

There was Divine madness in every direction, month after month. If not across the ocean, then across the country; from Sumatra to Wall Street, crashing markets and storms, Love and Words, so much Love… Sparks struck everywhere. There was an undeniable awareness that God was moving, and we were winning, forget history, ‘people couldn’t possibly fall back into such foolishness ever again’… ah, we REALLY should believe what the Bible says about that. My wife is presently teaching on that; prophetic pun inteneded.

And that, I know, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory which faith aspires to: conquest over forces Old and Evil. It is True. But it was doubtful to too many because it wasn’t the way that they had imagined it would be, again, not political or military, not physical or seen. God DOes NOT that way. He says, “they need that like another Liar, like the one they chose.” But back then, We had His momentum. As one worldly journalist wrote in awe, “they were riding the crest of a High and Beautiful wave…”

Then a few nights ago, on a stretch of hurricane evacuation route (often covered with water)… I downshifted easy, acclerated hard, looked over at my sleeping bride, and I awoke where that wave finally broke. I wept for every reason; and then I looked into a clear, darkly enceinte sky above the light-rimmed ocean and Really Remembered and Realized that a wave is merely a sign of its source, and the source always sends another. There is so much more at work, deep and high. So, and again…

Hebrews 10:26-30 (NASB)