Inside The Gate

The sun was setting over the river on Sunday evening as my good friend and I were crossing the Southside Bridge over the Coosa River on highway 77.  It was a beautiful sight and we were having a great conversation about life.  We spend so many hours of our day working physically or mentally to earn a paycheck in order to make ends meet each month.  Twenty-four hours are awarded each day and if you break it down to how much of that time you spend doing something you actually enjoy it can get depressing.  Well, I don’t need much to get me depressed, so I have to figure out a way to turn that negative statistic into something positive.  The mundane tasks that we entrench ourselves in are temporary.  Meeting the monthly bills, achieving the best grades, or finding the right person to spend your life with are all temporary goals.  In the GRAND scheme of things, we are all just trying to get inside the gate…..the gates of Heaven.

After a long hard day at work on Monday I came home and turned on the TV, expecting there to be nothing to grab my attention and so I would most likely just shower, slide into bed and stare at the ceiling until I could drift off to sleep sometime in the wee hours of the night and repeat the same cycle the next day.  Fortunately, God had something different in store for me.  I actually flipped through the channels and landed on the OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).  When you are finished laughing out loud, go ahead and keep reading.  I am not a big Oprah fan at all.  Especially since she and I are on different ends of the political spectrum.  What grabbed my attention was that she and Tyler Perry were at a church service led by Joel Osteen.  After the service, she visited with Joel and Victoria and their children at the Osteen home near Houston, TX.  The interview was amazing.  I have read many devotionals, books, and other writings from Joel, but to see him in a personal interview with probably the world’s best interviewer was amazing.  He was confident and I loved that he stood up for Christianity.

With age and experience comes so much more understanding about everything.  Christianity and our personal relationship with God is among these things.  Having been raised in a fire and brimstone church, I am thankful I have been able to grow and evolve to a point that I understand the true meaning of the sacrifice that Jesus made.  Men like Joel Osteen are doing everything in their power to convince Americans and people around the world that it is a wonderful and easy path to Heaven, if we just accept Jesus as our Savior and God as our Father.  Years of having it browbeaten into me from the pulpit, “you will never be good enough unless you are perfect,” completely contradicts the very subject that was being taught, Jesus Christ was the only perfect man to ever live in the flesh. 

As a person who battles with depression and bipolar disorder on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, you can imagine how I would never feel that I could achieve salvation. I finally truly understood what it meant to have a personal relationship with God.  It only matters what happens between He and I.  It doesn’t matter what you, the neighbor, my ex-minister, an ex-boss or anyone else might think.  There is only one judge and there is only one goal…making it inside the gates of Heaven.  I have done what is necessary to achieve this.  I have formed, continue to build, and now understand my relationship with the Father.  I am watching it evolve daily.

Mr. Osteen spoke eloquently about the abundance that God wants His people to live in, so of course we should have goals and objectives and we should reap rewards in this life.  As my friend and I continued south on highway 77 we talked about making the most of the short time we have in this world, but understanding that the trials and tribulation would just make it sweeter on the other side.

God operates in a different time frame than I do.  I have to understand that my calendar doesn’t sync with His.  I may have five days left, or I may have five thousand days left.  Either way, every moment I breath I need to be thankful for His love and deal with the troubles and sorrow or joy and victory in the best ways that I can.  My faith guarantees that I will make it, inside the gate.  Love to all.