When were you called?

Today, among a heat wave and raging thunderstorms, I await the birth of my brother's first child. As we exchange anxious phone calls between my sister-in-laws contractions, I wonder who this child will be? What will he be like? What will he look like? What will his character be? How will he come to know Jesus? Then I realize, God already knows.

Daniel, Joseph, Samuel. These are just some of the people in the bible who were spoken to (called) at a very young age. David speaks about how the Lord knew him in his Mother's womb and Isaac was the long awaited answer to prayer. Many scholars put Mary in her early teens when she had Jesus. Moses was sent into Egypt's royal courts as an infant. Funny, then why do so many people feel that the Lord only speaks to those of a certain age?

Poltergist had nothing on our home growing up. With Dad's Buddha in the living room and Mom doing astrological charts and regressing people to their former lives, we had a very full house. I don't mean of people, I mean of darkness. Of low whispers when you are alone in a room, of objects moving when no one is there, footsteps chasing you up and down stairs and a hand, or something like it, reaching for you when you are fast asleep.

But something else was in the house too. Something clean and pure and searching, waiting for me to reach out to it. I didn't know what it was, but I wanted to run toward it and hold it to me. One morning when I couldn't breathe because of an invisible weight on my chest, and my furniture began to bang and move on its own, I whispered help to this power and it heard me. It came running, and my life has never been the same.

I take comfort in remembering this, in knowing my nephew is already in the palm of God's hand. I believe God calls everyone of his children back to him. No matter how they came into this world, what evil or good surrounds them or how long they refuse to speak his name. He knows just where each soul is and meets them there. Waiting, loving, calling. And sometimes it's a child who answers back "Yes Lord, here I am."