Further Along My Passage

September 2014
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Again September marks the transition of summer to autumn.  I find myself remembering the places around the globe where my work and travels had taken me when the calendar turned to September.  No doubt my life at Arbreux, the wooded place near Orkney Springs, Virginia to which I moved in 1991, found me in greatest wonder at the dramatic change of seasons.  The mystic world I inhabited then nourished my soul with nature painting the trees in a kaleidoscope of colors.  In late September, a weather front moving through would find me watching the wind blow the leaves to carpet the forest floor with a quilt of gold, red, purple, and brown. It brought to mind Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8]. It was there, searching the Scriptures, that the unique meaning for “wind” prompted me to memorize Psalm 103:  

He has not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.... As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us....He remembers that we are dust.  As for man, his days are as grass:  as a flower of the field, so he flourishes.  For the wind passes over it and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.  But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him...”

From Exodus 29:45-46, we have been given the pre-Christian glory of God: 

“And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will be their God.  And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, that brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them:  I am the Lord their God.”

 

 

 




From Exodus 29:45-46, we have been given the pre-Christian glory of God: 


“And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will be their God.  And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, that brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them:  I am the Lord their God.”


 

 


From out of the late 19th century comes this poetic testament of a Gentile lady who understood the immense importance of God’s heart for those who cast their lot with God’s chosen people Israel:


With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: the signal to a maid, the human birth, the lesson, and the young Man crucified. But not a star of all the innumerable host of stars has heard how He administered this terrestrial ball. Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word. Of His earth-visiting feet none knows the secret, cherished, perilous, the terrible, shame-fast, frightened, whispered, sweet, heart-shattering secret of His way with us.  No planet knows that this our wayside planet, carrying land and wave, Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss, bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.


Nor, in our little day, may His devices with the heavens be guessed, His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way or His bestowals there be manifest.  But in the eternities, doubtless we shall compare together, hear a million alien gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear. O, be prepared, my soul! to read the inconceivable, to scan the myriad forms of God those stars unroll  when, in our turn, we show to them a Man.   Alice Meynell, Christ in the Universe