I don’t know about you, but I sometimes get a bit discouraged when I read the stories and poems of the Bible.  It seems that people back then had a much more immediate sense of God’s presence than we do today.  On almost every page, there are tales of visions, voices, angels, and miracles.  Meanwhile, even the most spiritually-inclined of us today have to rely on powers of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination when forming our ideas about who God is and how God relates to us.  It’s easy for us to feel left out when we read the Bible because most of us haven’t had the kind of direct and intense mystical experiences described in its pages.  After all, who here has ever walked on water or seen the ocean part in front of them?  My guess is that not many of us have.  If only there was someone…