The Eternal in Your Now

By Dr. Ron Huggins

Book

This book is about God’s presence in our everyday world, encounters, and experiences. Of course, our eyes can be closed to such divine immanence. Persons of faith, however, are able to experience a life with profound meaning because they can discern the ultimate truths embedded in their God-granted existence. They can relate the Holy Scriptures to the insights of events, persons, and phenomena illuminated by God’s providential and earthly operations.

While the Living God is transcendent and distinct from His creation, He is also imminent and fully operative in this present moment of our living. This truth is abundantly clear throughout the entire Bible.

This book seeks to demonstrate how these realities have become plain and pensively fruitful in the author’s encounters. Then, the author interactively invites the readers to engage his or her own memories, thoughts, feelings, and prayer to create their own journal of the presence of God in their own walk of meaning-filled living.

Awakening daily to this reality grounds our spirituality for the embracing of the ordinary with a joyful insight for life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636307237

Book preview

Foreword

Any time words are written, the author’s pen is always considered within the context of the words and subject matter. The quality of novels, journalism, and research all hinge on the relationship of the devotion between the author and the content. Such is the case, and I would argue especially so, when the topic is on the eternal spiritual truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We need some reference point as to the heart and character behind the insights and teachings with which we are connecting our faith journeys.

This book’s author I have known my whole life. He is my dad. And my friend. And my brother in Christ. I know the earnest heart and relentless allegiance to God from which these pages have been forged. From the ceilings of the Carolinas, to the halls of Harvard, the floors of Florida, and the gates of Georgia, my dad’s five decades of ministry have been sown with integrity, patience, fervor, and joy. His priorities as a husband, father, and minister of the gospel were in proper order so that his witness was one that attracted instead of repelled. His pursuit of knowledge was evident through voracious reading and study, and his ‘boots on the ground’ approach to evangelism and ministry were where theory and ideas met action and results.

Because of his own personal appetite for the deeper truths of the heavenly Father, he naturally was able to instill in his children an appreciation for the ‘yet-known’ and ‘to-be-discovered’ aspects of a disciple. His ideology has no political motivation, and his weapon of choice has always been the sword of the Spirit—the Word of God as recorded through the Bible. His moral and social stances have always been founded in the way of Christ as not only Lion, but also Lamb: we are missional agents to promote the coming kingdom of God, and also live to preserve the parts of the kingdom that are already here through love and compassion. He has borne evangelical concepts of public faith through repentance, trust, and action, and encouraged private growth through study, contemplation, prayer, and expression (i.e., journaling, music, art, etc.).

My dad is not the well of truth that these pages will allow you to experience. However, he has had access to this well, this Living Water and Bread of Life, for my entire life. I know his genuine desire through these pages is for you to dine deeply with your Creator and discover the fulfilling peace and lasting joy that will accompany you each day, as I have seen it radiate in his own life.

May the real world events, the Holy Scriptures, and the guiding principles of faith presented in these pages draw you closer and with an effervescent joy to your Creator, Father, Savior, and Friend—King Jesus.

Andrew J. Huggins, Ed. S

Director of Contemporary Worship and Community Evangelism

First Presbyterian Church, Douglasville, GA

August 2020

Introduction

This book is a picture into how the Christian faith has come into my life in this transient world. It touches upon actual encounters with God and humans in particular crevices of life. Like pieces in a mosaic artwork, each fragment of truth is based upon God’s Word and forms a whole of meaning from the world of my study, experiences, and reflections.

Each written page begins and ends with a scriptural word providing the framework by which my verbalized slices of life are the bearers of historical and eternal meanings. The page following my insights provides the reader with an opportunity to engage in his or her own remembrances, thoughts, feelings, and prayer that may have been triggered by the previous page, scripture, or the Holy Spirit. This process creates for the reader a personal written record of what was going on in your life that particular day and what God is doing in these levels of your life. I believe the records can be a journal of healing and insight.

It is my hope that these pages will bring honor and glory to the Living God as He has spoken to this author in fellowship with Him. I am hopeful also that the words are meaningful as the readers find spiritual parallels to their own life. The secularism of our current culture cannot block out the light of God’s truth given in His Word and by His Spirit. Therefore, take time to sit, be still, and know that God is present and that your life is of utmost importance to Him. Feel His love and know His desire to have fellowship with you. Then, give thanks.

The pages of this book contain particular meaning for my life. The matter conveyed on each page is an existential event that I know for simply being there. I did not orchestrate these events, I was simply there as a unique, divinely-created, and called-out being. I was being there when I heard the stories of the gospel, when I read a particular article, when I heard a report, etc. Each of these, and more, happened when I was there. Some of these I have tried to briefly share with the