Three nights later I found myself sitting with Mother Clark and a new friend named Buddy Luce in the evening service. Henry Clay Morrison, the President of Asbury College and Seminary, and the one whom my father had heard when he discovered the camp meeting was the preacher. His subject was personal holiness. He used language that was new and strange to me, but the burden of his message was quite clear to my thirteen-year-old mind. He told us how Christ loved us, wanted to be very close to us. He told us how Christ wanted to belong to us and wanted us to belong completely to Him. I found my heart flooded with a surprising love and with a profound desire to please Jesus.
It seemed as natural now to run to Him as it would have been the week before to avoid Him. I found myself joyfully kneeling at the altar eager to let Him know that I wanted to be wholly His.
In the years since, I have never found words adequate to describe to anyone what those next few hours were like. It was years before I even tried. Human language just could not do justice to what occurred. A joy flooded my inner being, a joy of a deeper magnitude and of a different essence than anything I had ever known before. It was the sense of a Presence, an Other, who had come to me. All the bits of glory of that moment were the natural accompaniments that came with His holy Presence. It was not just that I felt that He had now entered me and that I now possessed Him. Rather, he had welcomed me into Himself. I did not have to reach out to touch Him. He was in me, and I was in Him. Later, I would learn the Trinitarian language behind the concept of the exchanged life – co-inherence, but for that moment, all I knew was that He possessed me, that I was His and He was mine.
Finally, at 10 o’clock my mother came into the tabernacle and said, “Son, you need to go to bed.” There were two ladies who continued to kneel at the altar though the congregation was long gone. I looked at my mother and said as I pointed to the two ladies who were still kneeling, “Go home before they have found what I have found?” Such was unthinkable. I had found the Pearl of Great Price, and I knew that it had to be shared. Somehow, I knew that this was for the whole world, and I must do what I could do so that all might know the One who had now given Himself in His fullness to me.
My mother in an amazing moment of wisdom left me alone. All that night I gloried in that Presence in a flow of love that I knew did not have its source in me. That night I sensed, though I could not fully understand, that He had chosen to love His world and all its inhabitants – that this love is more than something He does, it is who He is, and to dwell in Him is to dwell in that love.
That was the first night in my thirteen-year-old life that I went the whole night without going to sleep. It was 6:30 the next morning in the morning prayer meeting, that I fell sound asleep in my pew!
The intensity of the sense of His presence did not become an unbroken constancy for me. It would have been too much. But he had let me taste. The memory became the foundation stone of my personal existence. I knew that the Living Christ was a reality, a reality that could not be denied. I had met Him and had known His love.