Wading

After worship in a skilled nursing community this week, one of the patients, Stephen raised his hand and told me he had a question. His physical health is very poor. He and I are probably about the same age - that age of, as two older ones described me this week, of being neither young nor old.  I went over to him, and he asked why I never led the community in a salvation prayer.  I could not even think what that was so I asked him to explain.  He looked surprised and said, "When we ask people to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. There are people here who are not saved." 

 

I looked around the room. While I certainly saw people in a wide variety of physical, mental, and emotional conditions, I really could not spot one that was not saved. I took a breath and said, "That is because I believe we are all broken and we are all loved. Therefore, we are all saved."  He looked at me with his one good eye, and asked incredulously, "Do you really believe that?". I assured him that I believed it so much that I had dedicated my life and ministry to that belief.  

 

As we talked further, we actually found a lot of common ground. The need for confession. The need to open our hearts to that love that is always there for us.  Yet, I have a sense of the conversation being incomplete, and for some reason I have not been able to let this sense of incompleteness go.  I would have liked to have taken the conversation a little further, but there were just too many interruptions. I know that while Stephen and I have worshiped together for awhile, there is a good chance I may never see him again.  This conversation and my sense of incompleteness I must lift to God and let it go. However, I think if I had dedicated my spiritual life to making sure I was saved, and then someone comes along and says you and your beleaguered neighbor have been saved all along, I might be troubled.  Yet, as I write this, I remember the wonderful old spiritual, "Wade in the Water." I hear the words, "God's gonna trouble the water."  It is believed that Harriet Tubman would sing this song when she thought escaping slaves needed to get off the path and go into the river to avoid capture. I am reminded that our journeys to freedom, while can be made in a instant, are seldom completed in one day.  We all have a ways to go. 

 

Holy God, please continue to stir the waters of my soul.