I want to show you a picture that may look normal to you, but not to me.
You might tell me it’s nothing more than area of cattails, a common sight along the shoreline of many ponds and lakes.
Maybe that’s what you would say. But when I took this picture the other day, I felt like I was in a twi-light zone that didn’t allow me to explain what I was seeing.
Here’s the problem. My son and I have kayaked this lake more than once a week for the last two summers. We did so last fall until the weather turned too cold. We put our kayaks in and out of the water at this launch site. Even though this is Reeds Lake, never did we see one cattail growing at this spot.
Now, there was not only a huge area of cattails, but red winged blackbirds staking out nesting territory, and small trees growing among the cattails in an area that had nothing but seaweed last fall.
Even more strangely, we had walked onto a frozen lake only a few weeks ago, from this very shoreline, and never saw anything but snow covered ice. No cattails.
Click on Pictures to Enlarge
Feeling a bit like a couple of Rip Van Winkles waking up after a very long nap, we just kept looking at each other and laughing. I took these pictures to prove we weren’t hallucinating.
After a few minutes of not knowing what to think, we walked over to a couple of fishermen and asked them if they were familiar with the lake. They looked at us kind of funny and said, “Yes, why?” When we told them, they started laughing too. Knowing how strange it looked, they explained that during a windstorm a couple of days earlier this whole area of bog and cattails had broken off from the opposite shoreline, and drifted to this corner of the lake.
It was a reasonable explanation that I don’t think I could have guessed.
After having a day to think about it, am thinking something similar happened along the shoreline of Galilee 2000 years ago. Am wondering whether a group of fishermen from Bethsaida, a possessed woman of Magdala , and a tax collector from Capernaum didn’t seem just as unexplainable to the neighbors who had known them… before meeting Jesus.
The New Testament record of Acts describes how amazed people were by what they were seeing in the disciples of Jesus after the wind of the Day of Pentecost(Acts 2:2). So, Luke writes, “When they (Jewish leaders) saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).
Shows backhoed bog that drifted with the cattails
In some ways, the answer was the same. The wind had blown.
Isn’t this what the New Testament describes? People changed not by their own effort, but by the breath and Spirit of God?
So am asking myself again this morning a question the Apostle Paul wrote to followers of Christ in Galatia (years after his own dramatic change): MD, I ask, “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect (spiritually complete and mature) by the flesh? (Gal 3:3).
Seems to me that this is a question, and an answer, worth thinking about, together– again today.
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