they are not everything.

I was watching people at the altar tonight.

Some come alone, some in pairs. Older couples sit on the steps, holding one another, and praying. Young people fall to their knees, sitting back on their legs folded underneath them, holding their hands to heaven. Others bow deeply, touching their foreheads to the carpet, their hands planted on either side as their bodies seem to shake with the force of their prayers. Some cry. One woman sits up, barefoot, a few feet from the stairs, her shoes next to her and, as though on a beach, she smiles up towards the sunny bright lights.

It is oddly touching.

Odd because I begin to wonder...why do these people do this? Have they been doing it all their lives? How old were they when they first approached the altar en masse like this? Do they come every time the altar is "opened"? What do they experience while there? Why does she cry like that? And him?

I'm not a stranger to altars alone, though certainly to this kind of organized altar activity. And though I am used to seeing it now, I am reminded by it of my mother visiting James River in July, whispering to me as people began approaching for the prayer for the sick, "What are they doing now?" So...odd.

And touching. I watched them, and I kept hearing in my mind, "What does this mean?" What does it mean? What am I watching? What am I seeing? What am I feeling in response?

What does it mean?

I look and see young people. Some I know to be highly intelligent and thoughtful and modern people. And I know that they believe deeply in what I'm seeing. They believe in Christ as an atoning savior, in God as an all-powerful Father, in the Spirit as he moves through our lives, in tongues, and altar calls, and charismatic worship. My mind flickers back to whatever ideas I have of Christ having walked on this earth. I try to imagine God, incarnate. In the imagining, I see a force moving throughout history, up to this very second, and I understand the power of a movement that has been re-created here in this room, tonight, as vividly real now as then.

I live mostly in a world that claims my faith to be foolishness, if not in its entirety than certainly in its aspects. My professors are seldom kind to religion. The papers I read treat it as an obvious mental defect or illusion. My friends are respectful of my spirituality, but scornful of large chunks of religious behavior and belief. My parents are now church-involved, though really only nominally spiritual, in some ways. And my orientation towards any behavior or belief is almost always a probing.. why? What is the simplest explanation for this behavior? God is not simple.

So I forgive myself for my confusion, and jadedness. For the part that asks "Why do they approach the altar? Is it because they were raised that way?"

I forgive myself, and pray for His forgiveness. Most of all, I pray for the uplifted hands, and the tears, and the bended knees--that why ever they find themselves at the altar, God would hear their prayers. That they would sense, so tremendously, that their struggles play a part in the greatest redemption.

Chesterton wrote that though the dragon's jaws may fill the sky, still they are not everything. We are not everything.

But He is.