SPECIAL FESTIVAL ESSAY: HE'S BEEN DOUBLY GOOD TO ME
Last week, I vented my frustrations at my current situation. But this week, it seems (thankfully) that the situation is beginning to change for the better. Okay--so I was in a sarcastic mood last time--get over it!!
Let's say that events within the past few days have turned desperation into hope and fear into optimism. It always seems like this time of year brings out the best and worst of things. In Rosh Hashanah/Feast of Trumpets, God promises deliverance and restoration. In the Day of Atonement/Yom Kippur, He promises us at-one-ment, a sense of finally being united with him. But the time I seem to always like best (even better than Christmas) is the time of Sukkot/Feast of Tabernacles--the "season of our joy".
It always seems like everything bad that can happen wrong will happen during this special time. But it's also during this time that some of the happiest things in my life finally come to pass and that what might later make up the highlights of what will eventually be the contents of my life's highlight reel. As I contemplate some current things in my personal life (which I won't go into here) and hopefully begin to truly experience what might be the beginning of a special season of joy in my life, I think back on another time in my life when I began to feel even more freer in the spiritual realm--back to my very first Feast exactly eight years ago. I hope you'll allow me this time to go back down that garden path for a little while as a very special way of commemorating the Feast this year.
This happened during my second year that I was in Portales working on my bachelor's degree from Eastern New Mexico University. After some time of spiritual wandering, I finally decided (in a sense) to say yes to God and become a member of my current church for good and for keeps. One of the things I had never experienced in my life was a Feast of Tabernacles (since I had been born and raised in a family of Baptists who kept the usual traditions of Christmas and Easter). I got the chance to go to one of the Festival sites my church used at the time--Ambassador College in Big Sandy, TX (now no longer in existence)--but had no idea what to expect. Boy, was I in for some surprizes...
