Just a teensy post prior to our gathering at Hester tonight..........

The Church just took in a deep breath of life this weekend and is in exhalation mode. The fall 2003 version of the Regional All Group is past, yet the Kingdom connections still infuse life-blood into our veins. For me, the faces of soul friends existing only neural synapse and bloggable cyberspace incarnate for too brief a time. But it is a time to be relished and an investment well worth the energy that, incidentally, seems to be Otherworldly.

Having been in North Carolina last week and missing my very own community of faith, I find myself curiously longing for their touches, both physical and spiritual. Regional All Groupings tend to make me especially fond of these Veritasians and puts me into dream mode. The big picture with other brothers and sisters on this train from around this nation puts the wind in my sails even though I sit marooned in the doldrums at times. It gives me license to dream again and that is the food from God that mobilizes.

I was reminded of- or rather, apprehended by- a feeling this weekend while in the Brownhouse. It was a feeling of belonging that I used to feel when I would visit my grandmother's house in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her house was the only place I would have to get to feel this way. I haven't had that feeling since I was a child and since my parents divorced when I was in first grade. It was a feeling that washed a warming acceptance over with a promise of "more to come." As a relational vagabond of sorts, it is a God-oriented innoculation toward my inward selfishness. It was more than a feeling, in truth. Better stated, it was the promise of a coming Kingdom that spoke to me through the language of the memory of a lost family, but in the context of a newer family in the making that'll never call it quits.