What does Salvation mean?
A friend stood up in meeting and spoke about the word Salvation. A word with which he was familiar though had never understood it at a personal level. This set off my mind as salvation has been a very personal matter to me.
My first thought was, “Jesus saved me.” Saved me from what? I guess that is the point if you have no need for salvation you won’t need saving. I needed to be saved from a number of things at different points in my life.
As a child, I needed to be saved from an absence of a relationship with who I call ‘Father’ others call God, Divine, Yahweh. I know the difference of becoming aware of my heavenly father and relating to him ( I use him) than not. The most powerful aspect of that relationship was knowing I was loved by the father of all creation yet I knew him as a son knows his father.
The difficulty, it was something of a long distant relationship. It was difficult for me as a child understanding how a spiritual relationship worked so I did a large part of the talking.
As a teenager I kind of got lost along the way. My rebellious streak found it difficult to submit to adults and I became frustrated with the decisions adults made that had an impact on me both inside and outside the church. I also had not quite understood the father and while I knew he was an internationalist I kind of saw him as one of us, a Northern Irish Protestant. I made the mistake that many do of seeing ‘the father’ within our own nationalism and politic. I was yet to understand that he was far beyond that. Nationalism was more tangible and I probably wanted to touch ‘the father’ in the physical world. The conflict of Northern Ireland fused God, politics and culture the problem both sides saw him as on their side!
I knew I had drifted fuelled and distracted by the passions of nationalism. In time I was to burn through it and on the other side, there was only the father. Like a son whose father was a mute I thought I had to understand what he wanted, I did the talking. I had n’t learned that mute he maybe but he had another way of communicating. I would only learn it when I shut up and waited. He saved me from the disillusionment of politics and a sense of meaningless. Then I began to learn the language of the heart which is the language of the father.
Now each day the father saves me from a life that is less than and gives me a life that is more than by listening, feeling and trying to practice his heart, the language of love.
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