Robert Gorini

After more than fifty years of preaching, I have come to recognize that perhaps the greatest temptation along this journey has been to speak of an experience before it has truly had the time to become one in me. I have learned that this is a particular hazard for those of us entrusted with the call to preach, perhaps especially in the Pentecostal tradition. When you have walked through seasons when your presence is in demand, you learn, almost by necessity, to turn your experiences into words with a certain urgency, sometimes before they have settled in your soul. In these latter years, I am learning, albeit slowly, and sometimes with pain, to slow down to the speed of life in order to slow down to the speed of revelation. In my earlier years, I imagined that revelation was found at the table where preachers compared notes. But I have seen how easily that table can become a place where borrowed or recycled words are mistaken for the voice of the Spirit. Genuine revelation is always born on the path of transformation, which is never a shortcut but always a three-day journey: death, burial, and resurrection, again and again and again. I am still trying to catch up to that man who was blinded on the Damascus Road so that he might truly see, the one who confessed, “I die daily”.