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Foreword

For His own reasons, God brings into our lives people of various sorts: they range from momentary encounters, to longer-term friends, to those (often relatives) who stay more or less constant throughout our lifetimes.

God’s ways of working almost always utilize natural means, so that He is unseen to the world; yet His hand is unmistakable to His people (see chapter on CTI).

I have omitted most names, for the privacy of the individuals concerned.  This treatise has a few, some probably remembered wrong, which will be unknown to the reader; I’ll leave the significance of each up to the Lord, whose job it is to make a meaningful story for His glory.

My mind in some ways is instantaneous; as my outward man deteriorates my thoughts still come very fast, usually out-running my cognitive grasp on things and my ability to express or perform.  I am by my personality a “glass-half-empty” man, seeing things like Jacob or the “napkin-man” of Jesus’ story, who expected the worst at his lord’s return; correspondingly I usually expect a negative outcome.  I know God is the opposite, and hope that He will make me like Him.  Part of me would like all my functions to expire together, like a machine whose parts wear out at the same time; maybe the Lord will mercifully agree; meanwhile my goal is to know and be like Him.  I weep often, usually at church.

A generation of mankind is about 30 years; therefore in the roughly 6000 years of human history, there have been about 200 generations.  So a human lifetime of 70 or so years is insignificantly brief (it may seem long, but really is not, as God lives in eternity, and one of our years is with Him as only a day, and it takes many such lifetimes to make up the whole).  In this context it is amazing that God deigns to save any of us, and at such cost!  Yet I am a saved one, and I stand as a testimony to His grace; this is my story.