Read on

 The Storm lit up the night nearly as bright as the day and yet there was not as much thunder as I would have expected for the continual flashes.  Perhaps my concern for the children, not children as much as budding adults, was flooding my head so much that I couldn’t hear it.

I really couldn’t hear the thunder much.

Their eyes of need were seared in my conscience.  Thank you was their response to me.  Drink number 5,6,7, didn’t seem to phase them.  I said to myself, this is why my mother was in the toilet for many weekends in her early twenties after just such social events.  What kind of hangover did you have after your hangout parties with your friends in your twenties?

We had many, many wonderful prayer adventures in our twenties as we chased doctrinal integrity.  We stayed up very late.  We drank gallons of scripture and kegs of prayer reports from other countries and loads and loads of theological treatises from John Owen and Flavel and others, until we were inebriated with doctrine and in the deep of our mental capacities sometimes.   I am glad that we had to take the Cross Bronx Expressway home after prayer meetings and that oftentimes traffic kept us up much later than we would have had we lived around the corner from Trinity.

     We were chasing TRUTH!  We were attempting a coup d'etat of our own ignorance and attempting to take it captive to the excellency of Christ.  We were dancing with the dinosaurs of confessions and catechisms and we were saddling the horses of thinking and deliberating the effectiveness and care of worshiping God with your mind, as well as your body.  Our minds are somewhat tired and slower now, and yet we swim in the deep end of the pond of Biblical thought for our drink of choice.

     We have had 5 different Sunday School series in 3 different churches on the 1689 London Baptist Confession.  Is it relevant to concern ourselves with thoughts of our elders and thinkers 400 years ago?  Is it relevant to drink yourself into a stupor with a bottle that has sat for some years to become wine.

    I have no regrets, even though my youth was wasted on dead churches, my mind was bettered than it might have been had I been in a bar.  Although much the same mental inebriation is the result of much study with a silly youthful zeal.  I have come to understand.   “Thy word is a light”,says scripture and my mind does seem to have a built in magnifier to the thoughts and intents of my own heart and many manipulations of pundits and word whittlers, present and past.  That is a good fruit of much study.  I can’t say that we are better than those children we saw last night.  God might arrest them in their sin and make them greater monuments of grace than we could ever be and that is what I pray for them!  May they learn to become discontent with the drunkenness of alcohol and only desire the sincerest milk of the Word of God and Truth to the greatest drowning of any lesser inebriation!  In Jesus name, AMEN

War! What is it good for?

 The War of conscience!

The clouds swept in almost indistinguishable from the enormous sunshine that had monopolized the day.  It was surprising and consuming, the storm that ruled the night last night.

82 degrees my weather app recorded at about 3 oclock and it didn’t warn me in the least that a storm was brewing so quickly.  This kind of day reminds me of the part of Mary Poppins where the general warns Mr. Banks that there is a bit of heavy weather brewing at his residence.  The storm seemed to be just over the campus.  A bunch of dear young people were standing at the precipice of a catastrophe and we weren’t privy to their fall.  

I was stationed at the bar for the alumni reunion for the class of 2018.  I am glad I was, because I was completely unaware of the level of alcohol consumption of this age category.  My children may dabble, but I haven’t seen this much consumption since my parents’ and grandparents’ day.  In Moonlight bay the class of 1917 stuns their parents by all enlisting in the “great war”.  I knew many of them as educators and grandparents and they were many alcoholics, but I chalked that up to their having been so stressed with war in their youth.  Many died of their consumption of alcohol, young as Uncle Sonny that made Grandma Hanst go to her grave in grief or older in the eighties like Uncle Charles or Uncle Pat with monkeys on their backs so large that none of us could kill them, as much as we may have wanted to.

    Last night surprised me,   I fell in prayer love with these children whose silent cries in their alcohol consumption made me wonder at their social skills and why was this their hiding place from a room full of their peers.  You needn’t hide from your peers.  You needn’t be afraid, everybody is having the same problem and feeling of insecurity.  Alcohol cannot heal that emotional pain.  They won’t find that out for awhile, yet.