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It’s a quiet night as I work my way through Tom Long’s book, Practicing Testimony. He writes of an agnostic oncologist whose medical practice brings her into a youngster’s dying moments. As the doctor reached out to touch her patient, the little girl suddenly raised her emaciated, cancer-ridden body from the bed, smiled brightly though her sunken eye sockets and testified, “The angels are so beautiful - do you see them? Oh, how they sing”! With a smile of heaven’s witness, she lay down and died. The physician wondered, “Have I found a reliable witness – a teller of truth – one who can me see the Truth”. A dying child became the credible witness because she shared an experience that transcended life and spoke a reliable testimony to a physician’s soul.

Those words draped around me with the shroud of my limited humanity. Am I a credible, reliable witness? Is there anything in my life, words, experience and being that will open the windows of heaven’s glory to others? Or, will my words be shaped like a church building? Will my words be outlined with self interest? Will my shallowness keep another from the depths of Christ’s passion?

Will my shallowness keep another from the depths of Christ’s passion?

Yes. I, like many plodding disciples, have something precious to share and fears that lock it inside. That stark reality must never prevent us from trusting God’s grace to do what we cannot, however. Trusting that grace, I realize that my words must be few, formed by awe, fashioned with humility. I am not worthy to speak what is holy; what is as awesome, as mysterious as that Holy Spirit seed that bursts inside another with new life. And does so with no regard to my personal spiritual poverty – I may not be ready, but this evening I am awed at what God does through grace.

This issue of readiness for witness reminds me of a pamphlet I found at General Assembly in Birmingham last June. It was an amateurish attempt at testimony with a garish design. The text carried numerous exclamation points!!, BOLD warnings and italicized emphases. I almost tossed it away, but a phrase caught my eye, “Our Presbyterian Church is not ready for the report on Peace, Unity, and Purity”!! (In BOLD). In Old Testament prophetic style, the writer lamented the woes of our church, our prayerlessness, tendency to lifeless worship, dampened fervor, tepid love, mute witness. But his punch line poked holes in my pride, “The PUP report calls us to become a church of a sort that we do not know and are not spiritually prepared to explore. We must prepare ourselves spiritually to become such a people”. He laid out a ten year plan for spiritual preparation. Unique. Unusual. Heartfelt. On target.

It’s on target because it resonates with my personal experience this year. If nothing else the Report on Peace, Unity, and Purity calls the church to stop, wait, listen, and to get serious about being church, to stop pray rather than debate, to study scripture and to live accountably as reliable witnesses who bear the holy image of a “bride prepared for her husband.” I didn’t think I’d ever be “convicted” with a yearning for holiness by a PC(USA) General Assembly Task Force. But I am.

Last winter I read the PUP report thoroughly a couple times in one week. I spotted numerous difficult questions, implications, concerns and possibilities. But it was the Holy Spirit who grabbed my heart before the text. In the middle of a very cold February night, I awoke with the sleepy but startling realization that the PUP report is a call to repentance, renewal, and to get ready for something new that God is about to do. I realized how far short I am of God’s dream for me, how far short we are of God’s dream for our church. So I fell on prideful knees, asking forgiveness, empowerment to live a holy life and a yearning to be part of a church created out of God’s dream for us.

I may be the only one impacted in this way and I’m a barely reliable witness, but this is my testimony.