Then and now-

and the crooked road between...

On the fourth Sunday in Lent, while recovering at home from worship at Church of the Transfiguration, a text arrived from my favorite sibling, Vermelle, sharing a link to the service at the small rural Southern Baptist church where we grew up together and where she currently serves as pianist. While I watched the video, I was, for a little while, a boy again, a child of farm and country, coming alive to a simple faith I would eventually outgrow until I grew small enough again to fit in.

The next morning, I streamed the worship service at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver where one of my spiritual heroes, The Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber was preaching. How different those two experiences, but under-girding the hymns and chants and liturgy or their lack was the same plea and invitation to come to Jesus and be made right with God.

The difference and the sameness illuminated the long and winding soul pilgrimage route I have been following all my life. I had no map or plan. The way was known only to God, and opened to me through a will and a vision greater than my own. There was no way an eight-year-old boy could have known when he walked down the aisle of a little country church and took Preacher Davis’ hand and said the Jesus prayer out loud in public for the first time that by the time he reached his eighties, he would have morphed into some kind of unchartered renegade missionary to the Episcopalians.

I feel a bit like Mark Knopfler’s Privateer, who has sailed forth “not quite exactly in the service of the King.” But for all of that, I’ve been granted grace to preach and teach on a few occasions to people who accept my sincerity and forgive my lack of wisdom and polish. In return they have given me double measure of spiritual sustenance and refuge. Between the Baptists and the Episcopalians, I sojourned for a time among Friends. Their Quaker silence remains the country of my heart, where I feel closest to my Lord.

The soul makes her own weather, but a tree can only grow where it is planted.

Walk in hope-

-henry