build those bridges

Wednesday May 22^nd, Acts 2: This is what the prophet Joel announced would happen: "In the Last Days," God says, "I will pour out my Spirit on every kind of people: Your sons will prophesy, also your daughters; Your young men will see visions, your old men dream dreams.  In the last days the Spirit would not be confined to the usual but will explode in the unusual.  It is usually the old who have visions and the young who have dreams and the spirit brings the great reversal.  It is usually the ones in the church who have the vision of what the family of God should be and the young outside the walls who dream of what the church could be.  God will move wherever and through whomever God wishes.  It has always been that way and any attempts by humanity to wrest that control from God have failed starting with that tree in the garden up to today.  Most of human history has been efforts to subtly control and stifle the Spirit for personal gain.  It never worked, but we felt in charge trying to make it work.  God however spends all of human history getting us to build bridges outward instead of towers upward.  The Spirit urges us to build those bridges to where we often feel the spirit is not, only to find when we do get there that the spirit has been waiting a long time and has set a few fires of her own while waiting for us to show up.  The first step is to look beyond ourselves and see God alive and active in the world out there. The second step is to fan the flames not douse them with dogma.