I do.

I have in my possession the CD of Wednesday night's service. I picked it up this afternoon. I drove home. I put it in my computer. I heard the music key up. And suddenly I thought, "Wait! This is a thing to be savored. You can't just listen to an excellent sermon any old time, with noise in the background, and things left undone."

So I've spent the afternoon doing laundry. And cleaning up the kitchen. Scrubbing my bathroom. My sheets are clean. My clothes are hung up. And now, I am ready to savor the sermon. This kind of thing, by the way, is why I rarely get to decide what my friends and I do on Friday nights.

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And that concludes the second listening. I'm ready for a third, and fourth round. I think I like it because it's someone smarter than me telling me what I already know. It's good to be validated. I can hear myself laughing nervously in the background.

I'm being trite. What is this really about, Ashley?

I have always trusted my intuition. And with good reason. I have excellent intuition. I know things about people before they tell me. I feel safe and confident usually not because I know anything about an unfamiliar situation, but because I know that I can trust myself to navigate the unknown. I can read people, and emotions, and situations really well. If God does in fact give people special gifts, that's what He gave me.

And I've needed that sense, always. When you grow up with crazy stuff going on, you need to know who you can trust, who you can't, and when. When I was a child, way before I knew anything about Christ, and without having real knowledge of God, as I wasn't raised in the church, I remember lying in my bed, praying to Him. Crying, and asking Him to make all of that stuff okay some day. How? How did I know Him? I don't know.

I've sometimes felt that God knew what it was going to be like. He knew that He couldn't right the sins that had set the course of my life, and so He gave me this one gift, the ability to know Truth when I saw it, and to know those who understood it. It's as though He marked me, and sent me out, knowing I'd come back, because I'd have no choice. If you know Truth, you know it. You can try to talk yourself out of it, but you'll always know better.

I cry now because I know it's real, I know better.

I've been fighting so hard against my intuition. The one thing I normally take without question, and give higher value than any fact. I've allowed it to lead me through agnosticism, and atheism, and an exploration of judaism, and islam. I've trusted it, as I've traveled through my own heart and mind. In ten years, it has guided me over more intellectual terrain than some people travel in their entire lives. I've often felt as though I've just been going through one fire after another, trying to move closer to what is True. And now I'm here, in the South, at the cross. It led me to stay at James River. It led me to trust Lindell's words.

There are, undoubtedly, many more places that intuition (God?) will take me. But tomorrow is tomorrow. For today, I think it's time that I trust what's in my heart. That I accept it.

And so I will.

I do.