Have you ever let your mind wander to take inventory of your past? Not only the facts and events but the overall and sweeping panorama of your life with special emphasis on the spiritual journey that has brought you to where you are today. Now ,some of you had Christian parents who brought you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, so your perspective has a somewhat lifelong essence to it, but some of us can quickly identify a dramatic place that changed our entire life. And when we mentally rehearse the time of our lives that ended with a beginning, we are sometimes overwhelmed. You see, it often feels like a dream.

Why? Because for many of us our former lives seem so unreal and distant that when we allow our imaginations to visit that time it is as though we are reliving someone else’s life and not our own. David asked the Lord to restore the joy of his salvation and for many of us returning to the day or week that we met Jesus reawakens us to what we sometimes have taken for granted, our own salvation. Getting saved as an adult is an incredible experience when you realize we have decades of dark perspective with which to provide a breathtaking comparison of death to life, darkness to light, lost to found, and the unspeakable event of meeting, understanding, and the unmistakable first embracing of the Lord Jesus. The weeks surrounding my conversion are to this day something out of a fairytale novel and even as I write these words I am drawn to emotion.

Even though I was taken to church as child, and even though I went through three years of catechism and was made a member of the church, I was completely lost and without the slightest hint of a desire for God. On some level it is good and cleansing to remember who I was, without hope and unknowingly in the grips of the evil One, because it refreshes within me a grateful rekindling of amazement that should accompany my salvation. After years of studying the Word and learning about Christ, it can easily be reduced to a perfunctory journey without the new life fragrance that perfumed my early years of conversion.

And when we discuss things about Christ, and doctrinal issues, and the different streams of Christianity it can get so factual and algebraic that we can lose the fullness of the emotional experience of God’s wonderful presence in our lives. Oh yes, I said emotion. Many, many times I have wept both in private and openly just in worship and praise before the Lord of my existence. My exhortation to us all is never, never lose the presence of Christ among all the stuff. The blog banter, the unpleasantness, the doctrinal badminton, the personality conflicts, and all the other whirling verbosity that can sometimes sap your attention and thereby keep you from Him Who is all in all.

Jesus…our life.