All Saints*

People who are trying to grow spiritually from some not so spiritual bottom are all saints. Why?  Because they are like the recognized saints who have gone through a conversion experience.  There is no saint without a past in which things were not going quite so well, and maybe even going dreadfully downhill.  That is the past.  But there is their future, and that is where all the growth happened.  They continued to grow day by day into better people.  Levi, in the Bible, was a tax collector with a dreadful past of extortion and self-centered greed.  Jesus said Levi should “Come follow me.”  I guess this was Levi’s white lightening experience, because he got up and followed Jesus.  Then Levi had a future better than his past.  He even received a new name, “Matthew.”  So I like to think of myself as a saint in the making.  I have a past, not so good, very embarrassing, but I have hope in a future better than the past.  My problem is some of my past keeps dribbling into the present.  Whoa is me!  The spiritual effort is often trying to keep the past in the past.