We read a gorgeous essay aloud as family members recently written by Albert Camus. He seems like a person I would have loved time with. A devout atheist who was full of gratitude and wonder. I think he will be like those CS Lewis describes in the Last Battle or the Great Divorce. People who deeply love Christ but do not know how to name Him. Camus has this deep full-hearted love for life and others. He has this sacrificial devotion. I imagine the dead church he encountered in France, with many going through the functions and motions of “religious” life without heart without faith. At the conference we were at, the speakers described the church as full of zombies. Walking around dead, lifeless, vicious toward anything that is not a zombie like them. It is an apt description for some churches and “Christian” schools.

I am encouraged by my talk with a professor who went with her students to see and experience the revival in Asbury. She told me the revival arose out of students crying out in confession and repentance. Students repenting about racial division and deep unacknowledged abuses never fully named. 

At the conference at Princeton, a young professor from Creighton said he felt so much emotion being there for the first time. In the 1740s or so, his family members were separated from each other when one of them was purchased in Louisiana by Princeton leadership to serve as the college as slaves.  

To step into the story of someone’s life ripped apart requires a discipline of revival which always flows from true repentance. 

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” Psalm 51:1-4

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