Of all our modes of transportation, trains are unique: they go where the tracks take them, by design, not merely by schedule. The tracks set where they go. Freight trains, Amtrak, commuter railroads, subways, even streetcars go where they go. I’m not talking about schedules, planes and buses run on schedules. I mean the rails. They run on tracks. Those tracks are necessarily parallel. They go to the same places, but they remain distinct. And the cargo or the people go with them.

Jesus’s life has two distinct and related themes that run parallel, as straight and true as railroad tracks. One rail is the Kingdom of God. That is the culmination of God’s will. The other is the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, who came into the world to accomplish his Father’s will. That is the culmination of Jesus’s will, which is his own and is aligned perfectly with his Father’s will. The Kingdom and Jesus at the Father’s right hand go together, parallel, forever.

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Many Christians have been raised by Christian parents in the church and have known God all of their lives, which is a truly beautiful blessing. Many Christians come to faith through an adult conversion experience, which can be sudden or it may grow over time. And many Christians fall somewhere in between, with some mix of belief, sense of the goodness of faith and moral grounding, and a growing understanding of its importance.

No matter who we are or where we fit into that complex stew, there comes a point of personal revelation that Jesus is Lord and we’ve got to respond to him.

The name John Newton may not ring much of a bell with many of us. But if I say that he wrote Amazing Grace, we recognize him as having written perhaps the most beloved Christian hymn of all time.

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Sometimes a full moon looks so big, so close, that it seems as though we could reach out and touch it: so beautiful, so close. Sometimes it is actually closer, but mainly it’s the atmosphere acting like a magnifying glass. But of course, we cannot touch it.  But a few people have. The first, of course, was Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” from Apollo XI. 

The world watched and everyone remembers exactly where they were in that moment.  Those of us in central Florida during the 1960’s had a front row seat. We could see the launches. If you went to Titusville or Cocoa Beach, you could feel the whole world shake.  I remember my parents getting my brother and me out of bed to watch Armstrong walk on the moon on TV.  It was exciting and is generally regarded as the greatest human technological achievement of all time.

But it wasn’t just a moment.

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