Who I Am & Why Cerulean Sanctum—Part 2
January 17, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 2 comments
Ten days is too long between posts, especially when you are telling your life’s story.
I’m a freelance writer, so I spend quite a bit of time typing on my Mac and PC. Yeah, I know—”What a profligate! He’s got two computers.” Well, my heart bleeds Macintosh, but being rural and remote, my satellite modem requires a PC (thank you SO much Microsoft for being an investor and REQUIRING Windows-only compatibility), so there you go.
Anyhow, business has been good and the blog has suffered under that windfall and the book completion. Unfortunately, the book has suffered, too. I’m hoping for completion in time to catch the next Christian Booksellers Association convention in July. We’ll see. My final draft may not be so final!
Where was I with my life? Oh yeah…I was at camp.
After my first summer at camp, I knew campining ministry was the way for me. I felt God leading that direction, but despite being promised a full-time position after camp ended, the camp didn’t take me on, supposedly because I didn’t have a degree. By that time Fred was no longer running the place and things had changed. Oh well.
I didn’t go back to college. It didn’t fit anymore. I didn’t fit anymore. I took a job as a fitness instructor (I was pretty buff back then), but that felt miserable many days, and even though I helped some people dramatically lose weight and get fit, it still wasn’t what I felt God calling me to do.
My life changed dramatically when Apple debuted the Macintosh. I’d always been a computer freak, and this new computer blew my mind. I saw the future. Tagging along with a buddy’s dad as his tech expert, we went shopping for a Mac and I so impressed the store’s sales crew with my knowledge that they offered me a job. Within a few months I was making a small fortune selling computers. I was soon buying all the fun stuff I could lay my hands on: a car, more drum equipment, and a guitar to supplement my drumming. Heck, you can’t work in a camp and not play guitar, right?
Camp. Even though I was doing very well financially, I couldn’t get past camping. I was volunteering for a ministry into my old high school, and working with youth still tugged at my soul. I had to get back to camping.
On a retreat back to Lutheran Memorial Camp, I once again encountered my old friend Fred. He’d been asked to come talk to the youth group I was helping with and he gave another Spirit-filled message to the youth. And then something odd happened. I was chatting with some other leaders when I felt God tap me on the shoulder and say, “Turn around.” I did and I was looking at this woman in the center of the room. Fred was looking at her, too. God told me to go pray for her, and as I started to walk to her, Fred did, too. Without saying a word to each other, we started praying for this woman who needed healing. Something happened right there.
I talked with Fred about it afterwards, and he said that the Spirit of God was all over me. He could see His Presence on me. As I walked back to my cabin that night, it was almost the same night as the one when I’d accepted the Lord. It was uncanny. Same kind of night. Many of the same people. Same place.
As we were going to bed, I started talking with the youth in my cabin and I was on fire. I gave probably the best message about the Lord I’d ever shared. I could just feel Him welling up within me like no feeling I’d ever had. Something was indeed happening.
It was three in the morning when things finally peaked. I woke up and just felt electrified; I was speaking in the most beautiful language, but it was not English or any other one I recognized. I couldn’t stop speaking, so I ran outside in my longjohns into six inches of snow and just started dancing around and praying in tongues. I can remember that as if it were yesterday. The love of Jesus was just pouring over me, a mix of electricity and warm oil on my head. I could actually feel that oil cascading down around me. It was astonishing.
From that day, I entered the charismatic brotherhood. I am harsh on the charismatics here at Cerulean Sanctum because I believe they have lost all propriety and discernment, but I can say with all certainty that the warm glow that Wesley’s heart felt among the Moravians is a real blessing, no matter what some people may say or however it may be misrepresented by the less discerning. There are fillings and more fillings on top of that if we are open to being used of the Lord and believe that His Spirit still works in mighty, supernatural ways.
While some people were behind me on this new part of my journey, I had to go elsewhere to explore where I was moving. A lot of folks had no idea what I was talking about after my experience. I gracefully left the Lutheran Church and started attending an Assemblies of God church that was pastored by my neighbor. It was a bit of a drive, but I found nourishment there and another way of thinking about the Christian life.
Let me say this here for people who are searching. I do not advocate jumping ship with churches. But I also believe that young people raised in one denomination need to explore others, if only to see a wider flavor of Christianity. The river is wide and we sometimes stay too close to our own tributary. I like to believe that one of the reasons I have been able to walk with the Lord as long as I have is that I was able to take the best parts of the denominations I have been affiliated with over the years as I moved from place to place and forge those best ideas into a stronger theology. I’m a mongrel in the faith, and if you talk with any dog breeder, you know that mongrels have far fewer genetic weaknesses than do purebreds.
Now a person of forty still dallying with different denominations is in for trouble, but young people need to see something other than what they grew up with. Later in life I finished college at Wheaton College, and I was always struck by how timid the young people at the school were in their willingness to consider the strengths of other denominations and the weaknesses of their own. (Trying to get a Presbyterian student at Wheaton to darken the doorway of an Episcopal church for even one Sunday was like pulling teeth.) Not me. I took advantage of being in “The City of Churches” to see what other churches were doing—and it did me a whale of good.
Anyway, I hear the clock chiming 1:30 AM and once again, I am turning into a pumpkin. Thanks for reading this self-revelation. I’ll try to wrap it all up —fat chance, I can promise already—in the next installment of my spiritual journey. But I have a few ideas for new “real” blog posts coming up, such as
*Living a life of abandon to God and each other.
*Will persecution be good or bad for the American Church?
*Developing a Christian worldview for the 21st century.
Keep coming back folks. I know there are more and more great blogs out there. I hope you’ll continue to consider this one one of the better ones.
Blessings!
No tag for this post.
Who I Am & Why Cerulean Sanctum—Part 1
January 7, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 2 comments
I wanted to start the year off right by doing a “person dump,” my way of letting you know who I am—and that I don’t truly bite despite what some may say. 
Some things here might puzzle people, so I also want to eventually weave into that story line the reason that Cerulean Sanctum exists. I get letters from people telling me how blessed they are to stumble across this blog and that means something as the blogosphere expands and there are more and more voices to heed. That anyone comes here at all is a blessing in itself, when I consider it.
Dan Edelen is a tall, linebacker-sized guy who inhabits thirteen acres of real farmland outside Cincinnati, Ohio. I’ve lived in Ohio for most of my life and it has always felt like home despite the longings I have to see the world. Call it a base of operations then, if you will.
I’m married to the lovely Danei and have a precocious son named Ethan. We’re trying to revert our once-farmland back into farmland, but it’s been slow going and we’ve had many diversions over the last few years. We hope to get our orchard up this spring and wine grapes in maybe next year. I like to tell people that being a farmer is always a little bit of “We’ll see….” Right now I work from home as a freelance writer, tend to my son’s education, and try to finagle this farm-living thing about as well as Eddie Albert did in Green Acres.
I grew up in a Lutheran home. At one point, in my twenties, I was a part of the Assemblies of God and someone told me I had the worst testimony they’d ever heard: I was a good kid who always did what his parents told him to, got straight A’s in school, never got in trouble, and mostly kept my room clean—and then I found Jesus. Actually, Jesus found me at age fourteen on a catechism retreat at Lutheran Memorial Camp in Fulton, OH. The most amazing man I have ever met, Fred Gliem (a bona fide charismatic Lutheran, of all things), talked about Jesus that night and it all finally made sense not only in my head, but in my heart, too. I gave my life to Christ outside on that cold January night in 1977, underneath the stars, a huge wooden cross before me in the semi-darkness of a snow-covered outdoor chapel. I’d wandered outside into the chill night air to consider Fred’s message and found the Lord of the Universe waiting for me.
From early on I knew my call: I was to be a Barnabas. That man of God stood by the young Paul and ushered him along, all the while knowing the once-persecutor of the Lord would eclipse him one day—and it was God’s will for that to happen, too. I am a discipler. That is why I am here.
I worked with young people for many years, discipling any who were interested. During that time, I wound up at Carnegie-Mellon University studying Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. Initially, CMU was a dark time with few Christians for companions my freshman year. It was the first time I encountered people who were openly hostile to Jesus, too, and it shocked this Midwest boy. While that first year was one of searching for Christian companionship, the second year landed me in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. IV changed my life even further, opening me up to world missions, and best of all, inquisitive, earnest, growing Christians my age. I was quickly leading a men’s Bible study on campus and everything was suddenly a dream come true.
Except it really wasn’t. It was clear to me in the final days of my second year that AI was not where I needed to be. God had put a calling on my life and I had to pursue it. That summer I decided to work as a counselor at the camp where I’d first encountered Jesus. After the summer, it was clear: Christian Camping was the way for me. (Having an angelic encounter that confirmed this, only made it more clear. But I’ll have to tell that story later.)
In fact, I’ll have to tell the main part of this story later. It’s almost 2 AM here.
Thanks for stopping by and for enduring a little self-revelation. If nothing else, some of you regular readers of Cerulean Sanctum just might understand this blog a little better.
Blessings till the next installment!
No tag for this post.
Starting 2005 Off Right
January 5, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 2 comments
In mid-December my wife and I settled into a new church in our area. We knew when we moved to the countryside on the outskirts of Cincinnati that we would have to make some changes, yet even though we were disappointed in the direction our old church was taking, it was still very hard to sweep fifteen years of association away. Still, we realized that not having a church in our immediate vicinity was actually hurting our ability to connect with the people who lived near us, so we finally took the plunge and did “Ye Olde Church Shoppe.”
The church we were led to was one we visited when we first moved here, but for some reason we did not connect with it then. Since that time, the church watched one pastor move on and the other join the Church Triumphant. They had been without a pastor for almost a year when we showed up in December. That morning one of the elders greeted me and told me they had completed their search and were announcing the new pastor that evening.
Well, it turned out that they elected one of their existing elders to the position. He had preached quite a bit in the last year, and though I did not know he was the choice at the time, he gave a sterling message that not only showed a great preaching skill, but also an extremely strong command of the Bible. I actually learned a few things from that Sunday’s sermon. (I hate to say that is rare, but it has been in the last few years.)
What makes this all so wonderful is that this new pastor has just been formally installed this last week and yet he is already inviting my wife and me to his home to chat. He’s been “official” for six days and we’ve been there three weeks.
Does it get any better than that? Doesn’t that just instill confidence? He’s got a church of about 350 and yet already he wants to know the “new people.” Already I feel like I can be a part of what the Lord will do through this pastor’s ministry, even though this man is new to the role and I am new to the church.
I think 2005 is going to be a very good year.
No tag for this post.
Posts
Comments
