I have a favorite wine glass. It has a particular shape that appeals to me, and is a signature glass carrying carries two legends: “Stone Hill Winery” and “Vintage Restaurant”. I know exactly when I got this, nearly twenty years ago, and where I got this, and all the circumstances surrounding the purchase.
It was in a second-hand store, standing all alone, just off Arkansas State Road 7, a few miles north of Perryville. Gravel parking lot, an unassuming, weather-stressed building, broad front porch. Nothing impressive, until you walk in, then…second-hand wonderland! Seemingly, as far as the eye can see, everything to outfit a life or a home. Clothing, dishes, tools, jewelry, and miscellaneous things that my daughter would called tchotchkes, a show-off word that means decorative sitters that adds a certain ‘something’ to a room.
When you reach the end of this long room, you realize the building is “L” shaped, and in this section, every kind of electric gadget from clocks to mixers to flat irons, snow-blowers to lawn mowers to hubcaps. But, right at the ‘elbow’ of the building is a blocked-off area containing all manner of glassware and on the back wall, high up, is a shelf, and six inches from the right side, is where I found my second-hand wine glass.
I like this wine glass. I don’t love it, or cherish it, or worship it. It is simply my favorite wine glass. But as I contemplate that idea, I wonder how much of my thinking, my imagined worship of my Lord, my morning prayer time with Him is garnered by second-hand ideas and thoughts from commentaries I have read, or televangelists I’ve watched, or my reading of Oswald Chambers, Thomas a’kempis, Blaiklock or Thomas Merton. Over the years, I’ve read through those books and many others and I have no doubt that it has shaped my thinking about God and how I act out my Christianity. Secondhand faith-thoughts? Still genuine, still believed, yet not fully my own.
I’m a writer of faith-based fiction and morning devotionals, two different worlds. Contaminating, or perhaps enhancing my thinking is my education; I’m a developmental psychologist, long removed from my discipline. My first published novel (A Life for Barabbas) was an imagined life for a Biblical character, Barabbas. Fantasy, fiction, with a scattering of Biblical facts. A story manufactured out of simple creativity, salted with psychology and a story-line of fiction strung between factual Biblical events. Nothing magic, just logical story-telling.
The devotionals (Called Watchwords) are a different thing, entirely. Many of them are an answer to a simple prayer, What would you have me write, Lord. Or they are born in the early hours of morning when God speaks and I try to listen. My role in a devotional is as Scribe, not author. The only “thought-prints” I leave on a devotional are the connections between God’s Words and ideas.
My faith is not complicated. Yes, I’ve considered ideas of others, some of which I cherished, embraced and Incorporated. Yet when I come before the Lord in the morning hours there’s nothing between us; no preconceived notions, no secondhand philosophies, no borrowed ideas or religious dogma, just me, a sinner, who, too often, separates himself from his Savior. It’s strange because when I come to the Lord covered with mud and dirt, my only thought is gratitude for the grace I have received beyond measure…A sinner saved by Grace. Such as it is.
For What It’s Worth.
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