students of jesus

After the glory came the greatest message I have ever heard.I’m faced today with an insurmountable task, the natural conclusion of talking about the glory of God. Last week’s posts covered the topic, and generated a request to put up or shut up. (The commenter was more politic, something like, “please share the times you’ve experienced the glory of God.”) A second commenter gently chided me with the reminder that God’s glory is on display nightly for those with eyes to see. It was a valid correction. But the topic of these glory-posts is about personal experience—our need to encounter God, to see, feel, and breathe whatever degree of glory he is pleased for manifest. So here is a back-in-the-day story of how and when my life was forever altered because of an encounter with the glory of God.

In 1975 I saw the glory of God. In an era of leisure suits and lapels wider than the Mississippi, the presence of God broke through the foolishness of men and appeared to an assembly of 3,000 men in Kansas City. I was among that crowd, a 19 year-old college kid who had played at the God-game for the past four years the way a four year-old plays with a herd of buffalo. On the final night of that conference the buffalo stampeded directly into my mind and heart. My senses where overwhelmed. As Ezekiel reported, I saw visions of God’s glory.

The interior of Kansas City’s Memorial Auditorium began to turn a chalky white. From my place in the upper deck I looked across the auditorium and, while I could still see the other side of the vast room, it was whitewashed with what might be described as a cloud, or possibly a luminescence. The men in that place had been worshiping for nearly an hour, the week had been filled with revelation, and this was the last night of meeting.

I blinked my eyes to wash the whiteness away, but there was nothing wrong with my eyes—they were reporting what they saw. The room changed in some felt way I still find difficult to describe except to say that the air became heavier, as if something was pushing down from above. It was a presence; I sensed the presence as plankton might sense the presence of a great blue whale. In the passing of a moment that presence was all around me.

Somewhere in the auditorium someone suggested we take off our shoes, because we were standing on holy ground. Moments before the auditorium was a facility, now it was a place of meeting. I took off my shoes, stepped into the aisle, and bowed low like a Bedouin welcoming a Raisuli. All over the hall, where we had previously stood in worship, we prostrated ourselves. Men groaned with utterances too deep for words. To repent would have been foolish because it would have put the focus on me, when clearly the moment was about Someone Else. The proper response was awe.

How long were we in that state, prostrated before God’s Glory? I dunno. Ten minutes or forty years. Take your pick. I can only tell you it changed me forever, and the memory of it is more than nostalgia, it is a visceral response. I feel it still.

To have been in the glory once was enough, but in the 37-plus years I have come to understand this is not meant to be a one-time event. Nor was it simply a subjective experience. It is our destination, and somehow in God’s economy we can live in the glory even as we travel toward it. It would not be too much to say that everything in my life since has flowed from that moment, one of several moments in my life when heaven met earth in an unforeseen kiss.