Hearts Wide Open
The night sky, over an abandoned field outside of Ft. Worth, Texas, seemed to go on forever, the darkness broken only by the twinkling stars above and the distant glow from a large white tent. Several hundred people, more or less, filtered into the tent and sat down on wooden folding chairs. The dais, a makeshift wooden platform only a few inches high, focused our attention in one direction. I have no idea who the speaker was, some itinerant Christian preacher man who railed about Jesus and the need to be saved. Come up now, he cried at one point, come with me, make Jesus your personal savior. Who knows why, but I went with him, along with some other people, to a smaller tent where we sat again. I remember sitting with my eyes closed, listening, trying to be present to a place deep inside myself. And there, in the far recesses of my being, I had the comforting awareness that I didn’t need to be there. Jesus was already part of me and I was already part of Jesus and I did not need this...