Whether this sense of awakening that has gripped my heart in these past few weeks is simply another chapter in my life or another chapter in the book that still resides deep in my soul, I cannot tell. Yet unless I pursue my heart, I perhaps shall not rest. For some reason since 1986, I have captured the majority of my days in a journal and now for four years in this blog; however, all those stories and contemplations seem less than adequate for the “word stored up in my bones.”
But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. Jeremiah 20:9
This would seem to be the most intense window in my life thus far and perhaps the threshold of the fulfillment of my first call at age nine, “One day you will preach the Gospel.” Though I am nearing an age that would trouble even Moses, and living in a time when our nation recoils at such a notion, chapters like Exodus 3 bring both hope and fear to my heart. The fear being that it sounds so crazy, the hope being the crazy things that the I Am has done in my life thus far.
Perhaps that is the reason for this book, interrupted prophetically by another, “The Church in Foreclosure,” and further hindered, perhaps sovereignly, by the life struggles ironically captured within its numerous drafts. My review of those crazy things, the moments where stumbling would seem to end all possibilities of the “next,” has perhaps become the only means of processing those things sufficient for the sake of new courage in this old man?
Everything that has been spoken to my heart has now come to pass, with the exception of that time when I would know and feel bonafide as a preacher of the gospel. Why now when my career life is almost ended, when the numerous things I have attempted as a means of platforming that call now, seem exhausted?
According to numerous concordances, Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron eighty-three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh. As strange as that sounds and as challenging as that might be for my body, perhaps it is time.