Days 3 & 4
No time this morning for a lengthy report. I’ll just say that I’m proceeding on schedule, have been well cared for of nights — am still struggling a bit with blistered feet, and now more seriously with chafing at the waist — and am still dwelling in the Spirit.
The First Two Days
Big trees and manicured lawns: I was reminded of biologist E. O. Wilson’s comment that humans try to recreate the African savannah where their distant ancestors evolved, with its open grasslands and scattered trees; if the land we’re on doesn’t already look like the savannah, we remake it to look that way, regardless of the stresses this puts on the natural ecosystem.
The View from the Front Yard
Updated on Saturday, September 2, 2006 at 12:38PM by Marshall Massey
There it is, Friends. Just waiting!
The blue stickpin at the bottom of the picture is my home; the one two-thirds of the way up, just short of the river, is where I stay tomorrow (Saturday) night, and the one near the top, across the river, is where I stay the second night (Sunday). Then it’s off across Iowa —
Of Will and Ministry
And the thing about that intuition is that, if it is present in oneself, it will also manifest in some (though usually not all) of the people around one. It will tend to affect them the same way it affects oneself.
Tool Conversations
These salespeople, then, were looking at me through the tools of their sales techniques, instead of through their hearts. They weren’t seeing me as a living human being like themselves; they were seeing me as a Possible Sale. Had I fallen for their tricks, I’d have suffered for three long months on the road unnecessarily.
When It Became Clear, and Why
What was it that suddenly convinced them? In the space of those few sentences, I had apparently allowed a bit of the same thing I myself had felt, when the sense of leading came to me, to come through and be visible to others more clearly.
"How Do You Know...?"
“How do you know it’s a genuine leading?” they asked.
Cutting Loose
There’s a sense I have that when we render ourselves naked and vulnerable in this way, we remove the roof that normally cuts us off from Heaven. We not only let in the rain; we let in the Sun. We humans are made by God to be social creatures, creatures rooted in community, and that is really what we should be. But the communities we are part of are nice enough to let us fall asleep.