Looking back -- How to keep your glasses from fogging up...

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Date Posted: 12:18:44 03/04/02 Mon
Author: Laura
Subject: Looking back

A blast from the past, yesterday - I was listening to an Amy Grant CD I own, and the spirit was so strong - some of those songs are just so true, or have so much truth to them. (It makes me sad to see where she's gone in her life, since then.) As I was listening to El Shaddai, I was so caught up in it, and then I remembered the event I always associate with that song, the retreat I was required to make before confirmation in the Catholic church. I was in 9th grade. I think - no, I KNOW - that was the first time I felt the Spirit. Or, I should say, the first time I felt it and recognized it, though I couldn't tell you at the time what it was that I felt. But it was a life-changing event for me - I sought ever after that, to find that feeling again, but it faded away. I went to more of the retreats, hoping to feel it, but they became less and less spiritual, until I quit in disgust at the boys and girls who were sneaking out at night, who were just their to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. That was a major reason why I stopped going to church - combine that feeling I had felt and the lack of it at the weekly mass, and the lack of it in the home and the hypocrisy I perceived in my parents, and what else would you expect?

I felt a desire to go back and find what I had recorded in my journal about that first retreat, what it had meant to me or how I had expressed what I'd felt at the time. It's amazing. Oh, there are a few things that I'd forgotten, and a few things that I remember more clearly now but that I didn't write about at the time. But the over-riding impression that I had that day? Written over and over in that day's journal entry: God love me. God loves ME. It was an amazing, overwhelming realization. And that was what it boiled down to for me, what all the things I'd felt - that was all I could say to express everything I'd experienced. Such a simple thing and yet so complex. And then, in my next journal entry or two, a couple more kickers. I'd stayed home from school the following Monday. In my journal, I said, "I don't want to go back to school yet. I don't want to lose the feeling from this weekend." Sound like a familiar phrase??? I was 14 years old at the time.

And then, get this - for the next week in school it was all I could talk about, and I managed to offend one of my friends by suggesting she might benefit by attending one of these retreats. I was so excited by my experience that I immediately wanted to share what I'd learned - hmm, can we say MISSIONARY work??

Anyway, it was interesting to go back that far and read my thoughts and impressions of a singular event in my life like that. Over the years, I'd realized that that was my first experience with the Spirit, the first time I felt it tangibly, physically. But I'd forgotten that what I'd walked away from the experience with was the knowledge that God loved me.

Interestingly enough, it 4 years later, almost to the day, that I was baptized into the church. I have a hard time comprehending in my mind now, how all the things I experienced between those tow pivotal moments in my life, could have occurred in the span of just 4 years. It seems more like a different lifetime.

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