Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

• Matthew 28:20

“What will all that chatter and heresay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call ‘nature’ or ‘the real world’ fades away and the presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable.”

• C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

With the C. S. Lewis quote, I could go so many directions.  I have read this quote countless times.  I may have even used the quote.

I look at the beginning of the quote and I see the fog between what we think we see in this world and the reality of what is to come in the next.  But it is only speculation as to what we will see there.

But the second half of the quote talks about being in the presence of God, and I do not think my brain had absorbed the turn of phrase “in which you have always stood”.  And yes, it will be palpable, immediate, and unavoidable.

But I somehow lost that feeling regarding my mother.  I never had it with my Dad for he was hardly ever home, but my mother had already received a phone call about something I did in class before I got off the bus.  Teachers did that kind of thing in those days and it made my mother seem to have eyes in the back of her head, and especially knowledgeable about the elementary classroom, where she never appeared, while I was a student there.

That gave me an easy model when it came to the vengeful God who knows our every thought.  It gave me the thought that if my mother could know what she knew, God certainly could.

I do not think parents teach that anymore, and when I read this Lewis quote, I saw it possibly for the first time, but in the Great Commission, Jesus is not warning us that a vengeful God is going to find us thinking a naughty thought.  Jesus is saying that we will always have God watching us to protect us.  We will always have the Holy Spirit to provide guidance and direction.  And we will always have Jesus…  What are brothers for, anyway?

Sure, we did not get away with that naughty thought at 4:17pm yesterday.  Yeah, that was the exact time…  Nope, with Jesus in our hearts, God the Father did not make a record of that one.

Let us always think of the positive.  God is with us.  Who could ever be against us?!

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.