Nothing so dramatic. My wife's cousin Patrice is in town so I get dragged to an obligatory dinner and social conversation.
I have a color rendering to finish on Saturday at work to make a Board of County Comissionaers happy, and a Home Owner's Association less grumpy on Monday.
Good questions. I only have accurate personal answers.What need a person to endure in (I actually love that sentence) to be saved and what kind of saving do they get?
My 17 year old self was part of a gang ranging in age from 13 to 21. No one was over age 21 because sometime between age 18 and 21, everyone died or disappeared forever. Most died from some drug related violence, an overdose or a rival gang or a suicide were all common. Many chose suicide by cop. A few were arrested and disappeared into remote Federal Prisons for 25+ years (forever in the experience of a 13-21 year old). My father gave me the advice 'an apple contains all of the same genetic code as the parent tree. It falls to the ground and grows a new Apple tree with the genetic memory of that parent tree. The old tree dies, rots and the molecules that formed the old tree return to the ground and are reabsorbed to form part of the new Apple tree. That is the closest that we will ever get to eternity.'
The world is fill of people who are willing to tell me what they "think" or "feel" ... what do I care what you think and feel ... I am not suffering from a shortage on uneducated guesses. How about what I KNEW. I am the eldest of three brothers. One was murdered and the other committed suicide. That I KNEW. I was 17 in a world with a maximum life expectancy of 21. That I KNEW. I was not going to die in prison. That I KNEW.
So I met these lunatics who thought that they talked with God and he talked with them. I didn't want to know what they 'thought' or 'felt' ... I wanted to know what was TRUTH. Real, absolute objective (like gravity - true whether you believe it or not - Truth). This Jesus made some wild claims ... "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." I needed to KNOW if that was true. I had an Oaklahoma City type bomb half built for a murder-suicide. My father and grandfather were both chemists, I could read chemical equations in kindergarden. I was slowly manufacturing enough Thermit to get the job done.
Like I said, I had resolved that I would not die in prison.
So to answer your question for me, I was saved from hate to love. From death to life. From dispair to hope. From total sin to complete gratitude. From ignorant lies to Absolute Truth. That is what kind of Saving I got.
"What must I endure?" turned out to be the most mind-blowing part of the whole thing. I was prepared to DO anything, I was already prepared to die, what more did I have to fear? All Jesus asked of me was to TRUST HIM and ABIDE IN HIS LOVE. So I did and I do.
[PS. That is why His love letter is so precious to me. It tells me about Him ... about His heart.]
