Prologue: To the Saints Who Let Me See
Before these writings begin, I want to bow my heart in gratitude to the saints I knew in Santa Barbara, Isla Vista, and Goleta.
Fifty years have passed, but the tenderness remains. I remember your kindness. I remember your mercy. I remember that you made room for a brother struggling with mental illness, a little one who often did not know how to find his place. You welcomed me into your homes, your meals, your prayers, and your life together. Among you, I found room within the temple of God.
I saw another realm.
I saw people living by another life. In kitchens and living rooms, in ordinary conversations, in communal living, and in early morning prayers with the saints, I encountered something I had scarcely known was possible. The New Testament was becoming visible in human beings. Christ was finding expression in people who belonged to Him and to one another.
What remains with me is the ekklesia.
Some were regarded as more gifted members. I do not wish to diminish whatever the Lord supplied through them. But rarely was it the gifted member who gave me what has sustained my hope through all these years. It was the saints together. It was the community. It was the life passing among us, often through people whose names would never appear on a book or a platform.
I remember you as saints. That is a beautiful enough name.
I wish I could gather every name here. I carry faces, voices, gestures, and moments that time has not erased. Some names have slipped beyond my memory, but the tenderness attached to them remains. I remember being received. I remember being allowed to be there. I remember light shining through ordinary humanity.
Perhaps few remember me. I was a little one, easily overlooked. But I saw. I received. I experienced something whose reach you could not have measured. What may have seemed an ordinary morning to you became part of a hope that has accompanied me for fifty years.
I saw the dawning of the one new man.
And I have never entirely lost the hope that God will build His church: a people through whom Zoe flows freely, personally and corporately, until His life becomes superabundant among them.
No training or degree can produce what I glimpsed. No gifted person can possess it. It comes as we yield ourselves to Christ, allowing His death to touch our independence so that He may live in us. Individually, then corporately, His life finds room. What He gives becomes a shared abundance.
These writings carry that memory and that longing. Beneath their questions, their grief, and sometimes their sharpness, there is gratitude for something beautiful I was permitted to touch.
Thank you, saints, for your kindness to me. Thank you for setting your eyes upon the bride and the purpose of God. Thank you for letting His light reach a little brother who still remembers.
May He gain the expression for which we longed.
May that day come soon.
