Like Lightning God takes hold | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Like Lightning God takes hold | Previous Challenge Entry
By Eugene Levitzky
03/10/08
LEAVE COMMENT ON ARTICLE
SEND A PRIVATE COMMENT
ADD TO MY FAVORITES

Ingomar Yoronson spent his youth putzing around and doing nothing much and would have been called a lazy bum by those of the old school or an undocumented artiste by those of the new school. Ingomar puttered about searching for the meaning of life. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, those old clichés, didn’t do the trick. He tried New Age and all those other hip things and that lasted for a while, let’s say close to a decade, maybe only a year or two past five years. During Ingomar’s New Age days, Ingomar dipped his toes into the occult and got his pinkies burned. He smelled (or sniffed or snorted) deeply of Eastern Religions. Hooboy! He thought he was the Buddha one minute, Krishna the next. Every single New Age thing Ingomar tried, every single Eastern Religion he dabbled in, was a bust, an empty exercise in truth-seeking.

Now Ingomar wasn’t a fool, in the common secular sense of the word. But he was a fool in the Old Testament meaning of the word. To be exact – Ingomar was immoral. He loved the idea of everyone deciding for themselves what “truth” really is, the idea that each person is a god of their own and knows, day by day, minute by minute, what is right, what is true, what is real, what is to be done. In other words, Ingomar obeyed no one but himself. A truly immoral man. Ingomar found out the actual true truth about himself when he was a ripe 26 years old, in boot camp at Fort Polk, Louisiana (or “Lousy Anna” as the drill sergeants called it) when he was yelled at as he was in the “front leaning rest position” (pushup position), yes, yelled at by a drill sergeant with a face having the coloration of a baboon’s backside, yelled at with an accompaniment of spittle-mixed-with-Red-Man-tobacco-juice spraying into his face, yelled at so that his shame and his inferior position in life were there for all to see, yelled at so that, finally, his soul began to understand and tremble with fear at the simple words the drill sergeant yelled into Ingomar’s face: “You ain’t nuthin’ but an educated fool!”

Ingomar Yoronson’s self esteem went down the tubes that day, went South in a Confederate hand-basket the moment the drill sergeant spit out the truth. Ingomar, for the first time in his life, understood that he did not really know anything, that he was nothing but a tabula rasa, and a dirty empty plate at that.

God took a hold of Ingomar Yoronson that day, the very moment Ingomar wiped the tobacco-juice laced spittle from his eyes and began, for the first time in his life, to see. A song from his childhood, a song he’d heard his Grandma sing as she lulled him to sleep, lightly echoed in his mind: “Was blind, but now, I see.”

Christ took a hold of Ingomar and Ingomar wept. He realized that he had “wasted” all those years searching for meaning and truth, in all the wrong places. What Ingomar didn’t know was that God used Ingomar’s past life to form a future life in Him. Everything in our past is useable by God. It does not matter that one used to prance around in Hara Krishna robes, meditate with crystals, framed one’s face with screws and safety pins, carried a dagger in one’s boot or a satanic bible in one’s knapsack. The light always, finally, illuminates the children of God.

Ingomar Yoronson, not truly understanding in his heart that he was to “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” [Philippians 4:6; NKJV], began to worry that he had so much to do, so much to learn – to “become” a real Christian. He did not understand that the Christian is to “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” [Matthew 6:34; KJV]

Ingomar banged his head against doctrinal walls and theologies and church practices and traditions and suffered much mental anguish whenever he questioned whether or not he was truly “saved.” Ingomar became such a whirling dervish of a Christian that he huffed and puffed and blew his Christian House down. And God rushed in.

Word count = 749

PREVIOUS ENTRY | NEXT ENTRY
SUBMIT YOUR ENTRY FOR THIS WEEK'S CHALLENGE

The opinions expressed by authors may not necessarily reflect the opinion of FaithWriters.com.

If you died today, are you absolutely certain that you would go to heaven? You can be right now. CLICK HERE

JOIN US at FaithWriters for Free. Grow as a Writer and Spread the Gospel.