Rally Day

Well Rally Day is around the corner. Things are starting up. You can almost hear the voice over the P.A. announce “Start Your Engines.” Homecoming, that event colleges and high schools celebrate, and Rally Day, which church‘s mark, perhaps is not so much coming home to a place, but rather more to a Presence. Home is not only where we come from or where we are going; it’s more the present and a Presence. We are at home when we are in fellowship. We are at home when we are with, Another, who makes everyplace and every time our place.

In the midst of our struggle to find our way in the constant change of life, in the midst of our efforts to find others, in our search for love, in all our comings and goings there is one word that seeks us out namely God. With a kind of haunting anxiety Thomas Wolfe said, “If you do not come Father, our lives are like rotten chips whirled about us.” Before we speak or say anything God already has spoken to us.

God has already come; He has not waited for us. Into a summer running out of hot days, bumping into the red hues of September leaves there stands a cross, upon which a man is exposed who feels the vast swoopings through earth and the coming colder winds of human antagonism and the senseless inability to love and to share life. He is in the midst of change and with us.

We are no longer alone for that exposed man had lived in the midst of our exposed situations in this exposed silhouetted autumn time of year. He has broken into our homecomings and Rally Day readiness and all their claims upon our lives and calls us into relationship with Him. God has not awaited our call. He has come, neither to destroy the September and October homecomings nor to deny the reality of its change, but he has come to stand in its midst, to embrace its transition. And with His coming is the promise of our place, amid the coming home or our coming back.