What Really Matters

Feast Blog 2009

As we look forward to the Feast of Tabernacles  let’s remember the lessons of previous festival seasons, and prepare for our best Feast yet.

I awoke his morning to the squawks of our resident ravens, and the soft morning light filtering through the green canopy of alders that separates us from the wetlands. The pains are still there but I feel like I’ve had my first really restful sleep in the past 2 weeks.

I let my mind wander back and the crisp autumn air and dance of sunlight and leaves reminds me of my 6 years of feasts in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. There are so many memories it is an effort to corral them into order, and I am left with a certain sense of loss when I contrast the present with the past. But each time in life has its own joys and challenges.

I was a young teen who had bought early into “God’s way of Life.” I enjoyed the blessing of a Mom who really lived what she learned. Dad was a firm believer in the God of the bible and wanted his “kosher hams” to know God’s commandments and live them, but Dad had no use for organized religion, though he supported Mom in all her efforts to “civilize us” by teaching us the scripture. Dad attended the first couple of feasts with us, then perhaps having satisfied himself that we were safe and not under the sway of some weird fanatical religious scam artists, he stopped coming. He would tell us he was relishing the idea of a week of peace without us all, and would thereafter give us the car, some money, and send us all on our merry way. He said this with his mischievous look, so I knew it was only half true. Though I think it did give him a few days to indulge himself in his passion of flying small aircraft, something he rarely did when we were home.

As a teen everything about the new feast site in the Poconos was “supersized”. I’ve wondered if it was this way for the adults and concluded, yes! This was quite a convention even for modern standards.  I wondered how many times in the history of God’s people since the temple was destroyed had such large groups come together to praise God. Perhaps those golden years of the Church of God when the membership was growing rapidly to finally reach over 150,000 baptized adults were unique.  So, there we were in the Poconos, more than twelve thousand people rejoicing together in God’s feast, meeting in one tent or tabernacle for services, two and sometimes, three times a day for 8 days. More