Presby-Musings

It's a busy time in my life right now.  My calendar is full of meetings.  The to-do list at home and work keeps growing and doesn't seem to be shrinking.  So, to get an edge today, I set my alarm for 4:30 AM in order to get out of bed a half hour before my usual wake-up time of 5AM.   And then it all slipped away.  A full fifteen minutes of that extra time was spent staring off into space and sipping a cup of coffee as I tried to shake the cobwebs out of my head.  I don't even know what happened to the other fifteen.  I think I might have spent it trying to get my foot working again so I could walk to the other room without falling down.   I know that there is a "season for everything," and a "time for every matter under heaven," as the book of Ecclesiastes states.  Even though "busy-ness" isn't included in the list that follows after that statement, I think that it sort of falls under the "every matter" category.   And ...

When I was six years old, after my parents and I had come home from church one Sunday night, I came to them and told them I wanted to "get saved," and "invite Jesus to come into my heart."   I was repeating what I had been taught, of course, and I wanted to belong to the family of faith more than anything at that moment.   I then prayed the "Sinner's Prayer"--a prayer that I'd been coached to pray for most of my short life by pastors, Sunday school teachers and the like.   Bill Graham's version of the Sinner's Prayer went something like this:   "Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. In Your Name." After that moment, and for many years later, that last line of that prayer was what defined my understanding of what...