I can't hardly believe it! 10 years can go by in a blink and you barely notice. You stop and assess things and realize, "Wow! A lot has happened." But to look back on the time just really makes it seem short and unreal. 10 years ago I was in a totally different place. I was in Hell, basically. On this day, October 9th, 1996, I wrote in a journal about my life-changing decision to follow Christ.
I don't know the exact date it all went down. I was a travelling foot-loose hippie. There were no schedules, no watches, no rules. But there was a journal. That was the one thing I'd ask a date for. The journal talks about it happening sometime within that week during a Bible study. So I'll just celebrate today as the day. I'm not going to tell you all of it. I do want to reflect about what these 10 years have meant to me.
When I first felt the sensation of peace that came from accepting Christ I thought it was a temporal thing, like so much else had been. It wasn't though. God gave me peace on that day and it has never left me. I didn't get a gold paved road through life, anything but. The difference isn't that life as a Christian is "easy." The difference is that, though life is difficult, Christian or otherwise, I now have something I never had before. I have a supernatural force that's driving inside of me. It's a passion, a hope, a calling, an identity, a crutch sometimes, wings at other times, but its always a peace. A peace that surpasses understanding. A peace that holds me up in the pits of hell and hard times and says, "don't worry, this too shall pass." It is an undying devotion that comes from me and through me, the whole time being from somewhere else far beyond my natural means.
The Bible explains the Holy Spirit as wind. Though you can't see it, its ever present blowing all around you. You feel it, touch it, smell it, its real and evident, but I could never show it to someone else unless they too have ever felt the wind blow or have seen its effects. This force not only is at work around me, but through the atonement of Jesus' sacrifice and the power of His ressurection, I've been cleansed of my imperfections so that it can work in me. Guiding and aiding me, when I let it, to lead a better life. Not only for myself but for those lives that I'm so priviledged to be apart of. You included.
Christians aren't always out on mission fields trying to change a culture. They're trying to change a heart, or should be anyway. I hope that, with my life, I might be able to share with others this life changing power that I have only found in Jesus. This is why Christians seem exclusive. We are. We have what we could not find anyplace else through any other religon. We should share this, not to have an "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude, but because we want others to feel the wind blow.
My name is Autumn, although technically I was born in March. My mother liked the name. I like it too. It suits me. I've always felt described and owned to it. Perhaps that name was prophetically spoken through my mother. Not as something to call me when she needed my attention, but as a constant prophecy as to when my true birth would come. As it did in an Autumn 10 years ago.
So this season, where ever you are and however it is presented in your climate's expressions of fall, things will be changing. Preparing for the death of winter, leads us again into the rebirth of spring. So be reminded, as you see these changes, of the Autumn who you know and how she died once, long ago, only to be born a fresh and now has come to live, even 10 years down the road.
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