Listen

I had been running on battery power for too long and the warning light had changed from orange to an unwelcome blinking red. The reserves in my soul were finally running down to near empty; I was lost and hope of a miraculous turn of events was fast fading.

In April of that same year I had bought a Bible. Owning a Bible is one thing; opening and reading it is another. I did not have a mentor. I was not part of a Bible Study. Basically, I was a formerly proud member of a vast new class of biblically illiterate Americans. Up through my teenage years I had attended church; I had been baptized and confirmed as a child but what little faith I had, I freely abandoned for the far more popular religion of self reliance and self indulgence.

So I looked down at this brick of a book and asked myself why bother to read it? How can it provide relevance to my own sorry situation? If I were to decide to explore its pages, where do I begin? Where so many of my contemporaries had rejected the faith of their youth, why would I turn to the pages of the Bible for answers to my own self inflicted crisis? How could it help?

But I did open that Bible and I did begin the long journey of coming to know it and love it. Years later, the answer to my many question became apparent and it came to me from one of the Bible's best know psalms. For even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death; I came to realize that I am not in fact alone. When, early on, I choose to walk through this life on solo power, I inevitably lost that power and found myself without the resources to get to a safe place. As with so many of my contemporaries, I end up as little more than spent fuel.

The stories and accounts in the Bible speak to another source of power: the Holy Spirit of God that wants to abide within the heart of each one of us to restore our soul to the vibrant life God intended for us from the beginning.

As I began to engage the pages of the New and Old Testaments, I slowly learned to listen to what the ancient words were telling me about my own condition here and now. And as I began to absorb what I was hearing, I started to experience the cracking of my own shallow assumptions about the world and my place in it. I began to move from believing I could live a good life without God to believing I could not survive even one short day without Him.