Pentecost

I have decided to camp out in the book of Acts for a little while.  This is a book I have read previously, more than once in fact, and while it is a book I enjoy reading, as a general rule, I retain next to nothing after time spent studying the Bible.  I know countless people who can pull a memorized Bible verse out of a hat when they need it, but I am not one of those.  At any given time, other than the usual suspects, like John 3:16, or the better part of 1 Corinthians 13, the only verse I can call to mind is the one my 6-year-old is memorizing for his Sunday School class.

This, too, is humbling.

I spent some time doing a Beth Moore study on the book of Esther some time ago, and was more than suitably gratified by how much I learned from the study.  Esther is a short book, and not one that is often quoted from the pulpit, but one which, for obvious reasons, is encouraging to women, especially those of us who embrace the more palatable tenets of feminism.  

The study was exciting to me, both in its historical significance - I studied Greek culture extensively in college and was thrilled to encounter some characters from the Persian Wars right there in my very own Bible - and in the comfort I drew from gleaning some concrete intellectually-satisfying knowledge about the Bible.  Of course, I fully intended to go to the bookstore and pick up another Beth Moore study, but, well, I didn’t.  I forgot, life went on, it wasn’t important enough to me to focus on...

So it goes that I will now throw down my hat in this place, in the book of Acts.  Here I will remain until I feel I am really, truly getting to know the book.  According to my Student Bible, the one I used in high school and which has been gathering dust on a shelf until now, “...Acts reads like a novel, skipping from one exhilarating scene to the next.  Wherever the apostles went, action swirled, riots erupted, and a small church took root.  In an era when new religions were a dime a dozen, the Christian faith became a worldwide phenomenon.  Acts tells how.”

It was the introduction of the Holy Spirit as a character (pardon me if I continue on in the vein of the author of the above quote), that made this possible, and it is the Holy Spirit which I feel nearly certain is what is lacking in my own, oh, what’s the word?  Walk?  Faith?  Relationship with God?

I have had a singular encounter with the Holy Spirit (I think) and it was mind-blowing, but an introduction does not a relationship make, and there is just so much I do not know.  It makes sense on a poetic level that this is not something one will ever fully understand, but the gap between me and anything called the Holy Spirit seems to be ever-widening.

I have a feeling I will be hanging out here in Acts for a while.