Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“What can I do with you, Ephraim?
    What can I do with you, Judah?
Your love is like the morning mist,
    like the early dew that disappears.
Therefore I cut you in pieces with my prophets,
    I killed you with the words of my mouth—
    then my judgments go forth like the sun.

• Hosea 6:4-5

I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.”

• Isaiah 44:22

In the Scriptures above, we see near polar opposite images of a morning mist.

I became an Eagle Scout about two years before I found Jesus, but I had always been a church-goer and most of my service time, a requirement for rank advancement in scouting at the time, was with the church.

But I had “spiritual moments” each time we would have a night or morning vespers service on a scouting campout.

One Sunday morning in particular, we were easy walking distance from a major ranger station along the Natchez Trace Parkway, a scenic and historic trail from Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN, now a scenic highway.  You would never know that cars were driving nearby.  It was a foggy morning.  I was responsible for getting the fire started that morning.  Everything was so wet from the early morning fog and morning mist, that the fire had a hard time getting started, but I was successful, on my last match.

Because of my fire delay, breakfast was late.  Site cleanup was postponed.  The Scoutmaster, who I felt of as my second Dad, gathered us all into a small niche along a nature trail.  The sun finally cleared the tree line, so that we had direct light that bounced off the morning mist making everything look clean, fresh, and new.  The Scoutmaster, who struggled through the pain of Cerebral Palsy, recited some Scripture verses that he had memorized.  We sang the first verse of two or three hymns that we all knew.  And he prayed with us.

I felt more alive in the woods that day than I ever had in a church pew.

This was only one of many of these campout vespers that made me feel the presence of God, but it would take me coming to grips with the sin in my life, just two years later before I unconditionally surrendered to Jesus Christ.

But would I have had the second experience without the first?

Look at the Scriptures again.  In Hosea, the people experience God.  They know that wonderful, powerful feeling, but it evaporates like dew in the morning.  Yet, when we confess our sins, God washes them away like that morning mist.

One is a “spiritual moment” and the other changes your life forever.

Do not let the next moment pass you by.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.