FIRE IN OUR HEARTS
COMMUNICATE!
Many felt a touch of God’s love. Not all were immediately converted, but God responded to their openness. From the hills that overlooked the festival one could see thousands of searchers. So many were on a spiritual journey. New Age seemed to mimic the charismatic movement. Here were prophets, healers and counsellors; here too we could find prayer and music, conferences and festivals; and, for the radical element, simple lifestyle and community. So many had a thirst for wisdom, a hunger for experience, and a desire for a better world. We weren’t interested in simply faultfinding. True, much was deception and seduction. But among it all were kingdom seekers and God’s men of tomorrow. Our place was to respect, listen and look for common ground. They counted creation as sacred. The world-denying image that Christianity portrayed was not only sad but false. Scripture placed earth on centre-stage as man’s first paradise and, when renewed, his final destiny. It was this ache for a lost Eden that motivated them, as I wrote in our revamped Jesus Life magazine: The vision of a Golden Age! How it captures the romantic, the idealist and the radical. In its purest form it embodies the aspirations of a man awakened to his fall; the quest for a lost innocence, for social transformation, for an age of peace, for New Jerusalem.129
We had what so many longed for; the hope, the promise and the certainty of a golden age. We, if any, were the ‘people of the rainbow’, the keepers of the keys. Where we stood on 366