Or don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you? Don’t you know that you have the Holy Spirit from God, and you don’t belong to yourselves? – 1 Corinthians 6:19
I checked the recent data, and it has been well over a month since our river – The Tar – occupied the feature position in one of my posts.
The rationale behind sharing these photographs today is not so much the river as the mist. Any time the water is considerably warmer than the surrounding air there tends to be vapor on the surface. I think the mist is beautiful and when I see it I try – mostly unsuccessfully – to grab a photograph.
The ethereal vapor – that ephemeral milky subtle incandescence – is almost impossible to capture on film. It is as if the mist disappears as I approach it. The visual is so clear and obvious from a distance, but then it evaporates when I get near.
This is not a bad metaphor for the Spirit. It is easy to see how God’s Spirit is at work in the church and in the lives of people, but then – like a shaft of sunlight – tends to be impossible to grasp when I try to say, “Look! Here is the Holy Spirit.”
I cannot see the mist when I am actually in the mist. And I cannot point to the person of the Holy Spirit and say, “Look, right here!” because the Spirit is not adjacent to me but in me. But this is God’s way; God’s way is to inspire, to fill, to equip and to energize.
But this is God’s way; God’s way is to inspire, to fill, to equip and to energize.
To inspire, of course, means – literally – to inhale and to fill. Inspiration, then, is our being filled with the very breath of God, God’s Spirit. How can we see something that fills us?
God’s way, I have learned – and I am absolutely still learning – is to be in us and to work through us. If we are People of The Way and if we are disciples in the sense that we walk with Jesus, then we need to be filled and to be guided.
The only way to do that is to surrender. – DEREK
I went down to the river to pray,
studying about the good old ways,
and who shall wear the starry crown?
Dear Lord, show me the way.
All God’s children, let’s go down, let’s go down, come on down;
all God’s children, lets go down, down to the river to pray.
