Last year I attended Lake Erie Yearly Meeting and heard Lloyd Lee Wilson speak. His message was Christ-centric. I was not ready for that. It disturbed me, and led to some deep questioning about whether I belonged in LEYM.

Friend Paula helped me though that time. She reassured me that I need not feel a unity with Christ in order to worship with our monthly meeting. So I stayed, and tended to the light.

A few months later a message in our meeting spoke to me, and I felt a warming to the idea of Christ. Something opened in me and I felt a way of relating to the Christ idea that was not oppressive. I had never felt that before, and it was scary.

Around that same time, our Quaker Study Group read Thomas Kelly. This was a view of Christ that I had never experienced before. It spoke to me deeply.  After we finished Kelly, I read the gospels. I also read Thomas a Kempis. Never in my life had I thought I would do that!

Our Quaker Study Group is now reading Lloyd Lee Wilson, and I have come full circle. I am so moved by Holy Surrender that I ordered Quaker Visions of Gospel Order and devoured it. I now feel that Christ has nothing to do with the Church in which I was raised, or with the oppressions and misconceptions I have carried with me my entire life. I have a new understanding of Christ and am nourished by Christ-centric language.

The same words that discouraged and disturbed me a year ago  now sustain and inspire me.  How time has changed things!

Yesterday my two year old cuddled up on the sofa with Quaker Visions of Gospel Order. It was cute, in a "ha ha look at the baby pretending to read an adult book" kind of way. He started opening and closing his arms. I couldn't figure out what he was doing. He was staring intently at the book and stretching his arms out wide, like a T, then closing them in around himself. He was moving with purpose.

Then I looked at the cover of the book. It has a woodcut of a boy cuddled up with different animals. The boy is cradling a small bunny. I had never looked closely at the cover before. But Noah did, and he saw the boy, and this is what he was doing -- he was imitating the boy's hug.

He was embracing creation and recreating the peaceable kingdom.

It is hard to say who went deeper into the book's message. I can say, though, that we both got exactly what we needed from Lloyd Lee Wilson, at exactly the right time, and at exactly the right level for our spirit to respond.