Jack Hardaway
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What is it about old Rail Road tracks?
That shambled, elegant, beauty, and mystery.
They have been there for so long. They slowly curve into the distance and disappear behind trees and forgotten green overgrowth.
Going somewhere, coming from somewhere, a line across geography, a line through time and history, connecting across the distance.
Along their way, deposited at random, are jumbled piles of old rail road ties and steel, like old bones, like nests for some vast bird, wildflowers twining through.
That smell of well-aged creosote and corn flowers, that sound of sunlight, that screeching song of cicadas, that slow rambling, earth rumbling engine with freight cars floating through, like that Leviathan, God-made for the sport of it, a divine whimsy.
Old rail road tracks, old rail road bones, connecting things across the distance, across geography and time.
The Spirit of God, the vast winged brooding Spirit of God, connecting and filling all things.
Making old bones live. Creating all things. Bringing life to all things. Making unusual and unlikely nests all along the way.
Dreams, visions, the prophecy of the holy Word speaking and remaking the world out of the beautiful shambles of our lives.
A wind from God. Tongues of flame. Many languages heard and understood, connecting across distance and division.
The Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of Life.
The breath that is life.
Today we celebrate that ancient elegant mystery, that connects all life, all people, the living to the dead, the visible to the invisible.
And we listen to the prophecy to live again.
That spoken word bringing the Spirit back, breath to the breathless, Jesus the only begotten, the risen Lord, who brings friendship to our hostility.
The Holy Spirit whispering, singing, shouting Jesus’ name, like the high lonesome sound of the train passing through town.
That elegant shambled mystery, God connecting us to life, these old bones, living.
What is it about old Rail Road Tracks and the Holy Spirit?
That Prophecy that breathes life into dead places.
That reminder that the love never dies, it is not forgotten and that the future brings a hope that is so grand that it lives and breathes, we can we feel the pulse even now.
That reminder that God connects us, and that God is renewing what once was dead.
May we prophesy and breathe life into dead places.
May we dream dreams and see visions that bring hope.
May we speak and listen to the word of God’s deeds of power.
Breathe in the breath that is life and live.
The train of the Spirit is heading down the tracks.
All aboard!