Prevenient Pound Cake

I can’t smell fresh cut pine timber without being carried back in my memory to my childhood, attending my grandfather’s camp meeting revivals held each August in south Alabama. I remember the sawdust-shaving floor, the wooden benches, polyester suits and organ music. Sweaty evangelists preached Christian holiness with a Bible in one hand, a handkerchief in the other, and great conviction in their soaring voices. And all those rich images and memories sit down for a visit in my mind each time I do something as simple as walk through the lumber section at Home Depot.

I can’t cross a bridge over a small muddy river while driving on the interstate without recalling all the fishing outings I enjoyed with my friend Bert Deener when I was in high school. Bert is a fisheries biologist with the state of Georgia, and volunteered as youth ministry director in our small church. He taught me how to bass fish, hired me to help him in his small fishing lure business he ran out of his workshop, and helped guide me through the choppy waters of adolescence. Bert and I spent many hours together on shallow rivers and mossy ponds in south Georgia, and just by osmosis, I benefited from his steady commitment to Christ and his interest in me. So when I see a muddy southern river, if I stop and look, I can see Bert’s silhouette casting out a line for another soul.

I am so grateful for these and so many other little icons in my life that remind me of so many gifts I have received. They are physical symbols, “sacramentals”, that gesture beyond themselves to something much larger – to the redemptive presence of God that continues to woo and change me. To think that God continues to use something as simple as our 5 senses to awaken us to his attentive love?! Maybe that is part of the beautiful mystery of the incarnation of Christ - that he came to us in physical ways that we could receive him.

As a Wesleyan brand of Christian, I believe God’s grace comes reaching into our before we invite it. God’s love is intrusive, rattling the hollowed chambers of our souls, enabling us to recognize God’s existence and our need for forgiveness and healing. Theologians call this kind of grace “prevenient”; the grace that comes before. God is at work within me and you right now, inviting us into a wonderful future being prepared for us, and we never even asked for such a gift.

Beginning a few weeks ago, I can’t smell a pound cake baking in our home without thinking about the little boy or little girl who will join our family through this adoption process. By the end of next week, my hard working wife, Kameron, will have baked 59 Pound Cakes over about 7 weeks, raising almost $2,000 in the process. Our kitchen has been lined with heavy sacks of flour and sugar, and our refrigerator shelves are stacked with slabs of butter and cartons of eggs. And wafting seductively from our oven is a WONDERFUL smell. And as many of our friends and family can attest, the taste is even better.

But better than the smells and tastes, is the powerful thought that a child on the other side of the world has no possible idea that all these pound cakes are being beaten, baked, purchased and inhaled for them. They have not invited our whole network of our friends and family all across this country to participate in this cause. They are simply unaware of everyone who is “preveniently” helping to prepare a safe and loving new life for him or her.

I hope you can think of some of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches that cause you to “be still and know that He is God.” I know, for the rest of my life, every time I smell a pound cake baking, I won’t be able to help thinking of the grace of God.

We deeply desire to show God’s love to one of His own by making him or her one of our own. Please be in prayer for all five of us during this journey.

In God’s grace,

Nathan, Kameron, J. Henry & Amelia (and Baby Number Three!)