Chalet
LAbri, February 18, 2003
Repentance is always the place to begin with God. A change of mind, a different way of thinking about yourself, about the way you have been and the way you
are acting and what your needs are, an acknowledgment of guilt and your need before God that is repentance, and that is always
where God always meets man. Ray Stedman, from a Sermon, The Place
to Begin.
We are recovering from the good fortune of the heaviest snowstorm in several
years. For the past two days I have been digging out from eighteen inches of
snow. Elsewhere in our Shenandoah Valley the snowfall measured thirty inches. I claim good fortune because the benefits of a heavy snow cover have long
been known -- to penetrate the good earth with needed moisture, lubricating and
enriching all life. At my feeders, not a sign of a squirrel for the past four
days, so juncos, chickadees, and titmice rejoice exceedingly and make merry.
Confinement brings opportunity to read, redeeming the time.
For the second time since my college days, I am reading Tolstoys Resurrection. The theme of this novel is repentance, which coincides with my study of Marks gospel
and the life story of John the Baptist, that strange and wonderful ministry which zeroes in on the need for repentance as
the place where new life begins. Tolstoy tells the story of a privileged and
wealthy Russian prince who through a spiritual right-about-face discovers the blessed joy of a new beginning, resurrected
from a dead existence of living entirely for himself. Marks gospel emphasizes
the incomparable good news of the coming of Jesus. So wrote Halford E. Luccock more than a half century ago in The Interpreters
Bible: It was good news when it was first proclaimed. It moved up and down the country roads of Galilee and the city streets of Jerusalem,
and men and women were made whole. Jesus said, Follow me, and men gladly followed
Him, their life deepened with new truth and enlarged with new purpose. It was
good news as it went out to the hard Roman world in the first century. Down into
the ghettos and slums of Greek and Roman cities, where life was bound with every conceivable chain, the good news came with
a proclamation that lifted men to their feet. It has been good news down through the centuries, out through all the nooks
and corners of the globe, until it reaches the last outpost on earth. Tolstoy richly portrays what great joy a resurrected
conscience of God brought to a Russian prince. The novel is autobiographical
because Tolstoy himself came from a wealthy, privileged family. The lesson applies:
I, too, need repentance --daily in my earnest pursuit of that same deepened life and
new faith.
Fully functioning persons have
a deep sense of spirituality. They know that their personhood and the world in
which they live cannot be explained or understood through human experience alone. They
know that they must make the mystical leap. They must go beyond themselves, beyond
their limited reality. They have an inexplicable sense of something more. They feel a greater operative intellect than their own, even if they are at a loss
to give it a name. They are aware of a great design, incessantly operative, in
which all is compatible and in which there are no contradictions.
Leo Buscaglia, Personhood