I don’t know how it is with you, but occasionally I have flashbacks. Sometimes these are connected with a task at hand, or a decision with which I am struggling, or when I am wrestling with what I perceive as a call of God upon my life. Occasionally these flashbacks are connected with my preaching.

It happened a couple of months ago. I was struggling with personal direction issues, but had also begun to think of the assignment of preaching on this occasion. The words of a young man named Nicholas in The Magus, a novel by John Fowles, popped into my mind. I went back into my files and retrieved it.

“It poured rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange sense of taking wing. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a n…