My Take Now

My Take Now by Wayne Dixon The Christian vision is a life long experience. Mine began as a pre-adolescent when my Grandfather Dixon sent me a Bible for my eleventh birthday. I received a notice that a package was being held for me at the post office and how excited I was to pick it up until I opened it. “Oh, a Bible,” I said to my mother disappointedly. However it wasn’t too long before I began reading it thanks to my Methodist Sunday School teacher who gave us points for doing so. Over the years my Christian vision has experienced different takes and forms and this now is my matured take, a kind of reasoning as I continue the journey. Having experienced the ups and downs and rounds of various issues and answers I now see it as a framework for understanding my life. While that may seem presumptuous and even self-centered, I consider it a given. It encompasses beginnings and endings and everything in between. You see, the Christian view of beginnings not only accounts for the existence of everything, but it envisions personal origins. “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” said King David. And to Jeremiah came the word of the Lord, “Before thou wast formed in the womb, I knew thee.” I take this all to heart now, that we were all foreknown in the mind of God before we were born. My birth, then in October of 1940, after a lingering world-wide depression and before a second world war, was no accident in time but by design. If, then, my beginnings are included in divine intention, then it follows that the events of my life, too, are part of that larger plan. All those ups and downs and arounds fulfill a larger purpose for “all the days of my life.” I find that significant now as I look back and try to make sense of it all, to leave things lay as they all laid out. This Christian vision holds out the best for last where eyes have not seen and ears have not heard. I take for myself the words of St. Paul, “Then shall I know, even as I am known.” The best, then, is yet to be.