In a poem titled “Moments of Joy” Denise Levertov tells the story of an old scholar who takes a room on the next street down from his grown children—”the better to concentrate on his unending work, his word, his world.” And though he comes and goes while they sleep, his children feel bereft. They want him nearer. But at times it happens that a son or daughter wakes in the dark and finds him sitting at the foot of the bed, or in the old rocker—”sleepless in his old coat, gazing into invisible distance, but clearly there to protect as he had always done.” The child springs up and flings her arms about him, pressing a cheek to his temple and taking him by surprise: “Abba!” the child exclaims, and Levertov concludes:

“And the old scholar, the father,

is deeply glad to be found.

That’s how it is, Lord, sometimes;

You seek, and I find.”(1)

Though many would like to say that the majority of our lives have been spent searching for God, perhaps it is more accurate to say that we have been sought. Even so, like the children in Levertov’s poem, time and again I know I find myself bereft of God’s presence. Sometimes it just feels like I am sitting in the dark.

One of my seminary professors once told me that God’s presence is not the opposite of God’s absence. At first glance this didn’t seem the least bit encouraging. And yet, maybe I have seen this notion lived out after all. For even when I am most stirred by God’s nearness—when God’s presence seems an undeniable truth—am I not also simultaneously stung by the ache of longing to be nearer or the reality of not quite yet being at home? Even in our best encounters with God, presence and absence remain intertwined. What might this then mean for the moments when I am feeling tormented by God’s absence?

The Christian scriptures seem to suggest of the dark what children learn of their parents. Namely, the dark does not imply the absence of a caring person. “Though an army besiege me,” said David, “my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then will I be confident.” David’s confidence was not in the absence of darkness, but in the knowledge of the one who watched over him in the dark. “I am still confident of this,” he concludes. “I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.”(2)

Though we might struggle when God seems far off, perhaps it need not be without hope. When the land was dark with the death of Christ weighing on its shoulders, God exhaustively sought despairing hearts in the thick of that darkness. And the risen Christ is still today the certainty of God’s nearness and the promise of his care in the dark. “Thus,” writes Os Guinness, “Christians do not say to God, ‘I do not understand you at all, but I trust you anyway.’ That would be suicidal. Rather, they say, ‘Father, I do not understand you, but I trust you’—or more accurately, ‘I do not understand you in this situation, but I understand why I trust you anyway.’ It is therefore reasonable to trust even when we do not understand. We may be in the dark about what God is doing, but we are not in the dark about God.”(3)

Perhaps you have spent much of life bewailing the one who stood silent as you cried, disoriented in the dark and desperately reaching for something to make it better. What if God was there all along? Perhaps there is reason to be awed by the God who says, “Follow me!” and expects us to trust that we won’t be left or forsaken. Perhaps we should fear the one who won’t let go, whose persistence we might even find exhausting and whose faith in us we find terrifying. Perhaps there reason to be humbled by the God who refuses to leave despite the words we shout in unawareness and our unrelenting waywardness. And perhaps we do better to marvel at the God whose hand we can see clearly through the blinding pain of life. Though uncertainty may surround us and the darkness bid us to see that no Father is there, perhaps we can trust Him nonetheless.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1)Denise Levertov, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (New York: New Directions, 1999), 60.

(2) Psalm 27:3-13.

(3) Os Gunness, Unspeakable (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 150.

Some time ago, I attended a conference in which a well-known speaker related the cultural and value differences between his current home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and his childhood home in a small town in the Southwest United States. Many of these cultural and value differences found their expression in a set of rules for civic conduct. In addition to these proscriptions, his church culture also enforced a particularly prescribed set of rules: no dancing, no drinking, no card playing, no long hair. These rules were held sacrosanct. Their violation would invite censure from the community and stern warnings that his eternal standing with Almighty God was now in jeopardy.

As it sometimes happens with this kind of upbringing, the conference speaker moved as far away from his hometown rigidity as he could. He escaped to the Pacific Northwest—a part of the United States known for its laidback attitude and freethinking ways. The speaker believed he had finally found a community that would be free from the constricting rules and legalisms of his upbringing. Yet, he was in for quite a surprise. While he had indeed moved far away from the many rules of his childhood town, he was chagrined to discover that his new community had just as many rules. These rules involved intricacies relating to garbage disposal, the banning of plastic bags at the grocery store, and the sanction of skateboarders or musicians in the common areas of his upscale townhome complex. The wrath of God may not have been invoked in the threats of punishment, but the speaker suffered the self-righteous censure of this community just as bound by legalism as the one in which he had grown up. In both communities, oddly, he found that the rules seemed more beloved than the people they were meant to shape.

In listening to this story, I was jolted by the sting of self-recognition, finding myself within the details of self-righteousness in both communities. Too often, I easily look down on others who fail to live by my rules. Or, I can easily elevate one set of standards, while denigrating a person holding to the alternative. Regardless of the rules involved, it is easier for me to love rules than people.

What might be at the heart of the human tendency towards legalism? The desire to have clear boundaries, and a concern for decency and order to guide communities, is both necessary and prudent. Yet somehow rules meant to offer contours for human thriving and well-being grow into strictures that bind, stifling life and wholeness. Eventually, the standards themselves become the gods that are worshipped. But these are punitive gods who damn all who fall short. Clear boundaries become walls of separation dividing human relationships and community, and the enforcers quickly draw lines around the righteous and the unrighteous. Legalism prompts one to declare her “virtue” as the clearly superior standard to which all others must bow. Perhaps humans find it easier to love legalities because it is easier than loving people. People are inconsistent and imperfect, messy and unpredictable. Rules help to control and confine that messiness.

Into a world in which piety was equated with precise interpretation and obedience to the law came a man who frequently shattered this rigid understanding of righteousness. He upended expectations and eluded the tightly drawn categories of those who sought to control him. He often kept company with those deemed unrighteous—prostitutes, tax collectors, and others called sinners—and he earned the label of “glutton and a drunkard” by those whose laws drew clear boundaries around appropriate company. For those who had clear rules about the Messiah of Israel, this man from Nazareth eschewed political power and stood silently before those who would eventually order his crucifixion. And for those who wanted a “rebel” Jesus, wholly antinomian and defying every convention, he answered by challenging his followers towards a righteousness that exceeded that of the most religious-of-the-religious in his day. In his own words, he told those who would follow him that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.

Far from being a measure for establishing self-righteousness or from creating a new legalism for his followers, Jesus fulfilled the law by revealing its true intention. He showed that at the heart of the Sabbath law for rest was to allow God to work on behalf of human wholeness by healing those who were diseased, broken, and therefore excluded from community and from worship. The rest God intended for humanity was expressed not in the rule of non-work per se, but in working for the good of all in need of reconciliation. Fulfilling the law, he restored relationships and opened the door for transformation; he reconciled persons to one another and to God. His ministry challenged the lettered adherence to the law, which brought death and revealed that the spirit of the law was to promote life.

Indeed, when he was questioned about the greatest commandment, Jesus replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” Jesus understood that the ground of the law was a love for God and a love for persons. To replace the love of persons with a love of the rules missed the point. Loving the rules for rules’ sake engenders self-love; loving God engenders love for others.

As the conference speaker suggested in his twin-stories of community legalism, human beings are far more apt to love themselves. And we often love our rules more than people. But in the idolatry of legalism and the attempt to prove self-righteousness, we ironically depict a truth spoken long ago: The letter kills but the Spirit gives life.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28.

Not far into John’s Gospel, Jesus is gaining enemies at every turn. He uses a whip to drive men and livestock out of the temple. He breaks a religious law by choosing the Sabbath to heal a man who cannot walk. But it is because of his words that they seek all the more to kill him. To their anger over the healing, Jesus simply replies, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”(1)

To the person well versed in biting comebacks and fatal rhetoric, these words hardly seem like fighting-words. But to Jewish leaders who knew a history of combating (and failing to combat) the polytheistic influences of surrounding nations, Jesus uttered what seemed the most blasphemous notion possible. He called God his own Father.

The notion of God as Father was not an entirely new concept. Even to the Jews who took offense at Jesus’s words that day, God was understood as ‘Father’ in the sense that God is Creator, that God is Lord, that God is protector and forgiver. Fourteen times in the Old Testament God is spoken of as Father, and each instance depicts a glimpse of divine fatherhood.

But here, Jesus added to the notion of Father a distinct element of intimacy and uniqueness with himself. Nowhere else in Palestinian Judaism is God addressed by an individual as “My father.”(2) Jesus’s use of such a title—and elsewhere the very intimate “abba” or daddy—reveals the very basis of his communion with God. And he adds to this vision the promise of the Spirit who comes from the Father and testifies on the Son’s behalf—an invitation to commune within the Godhead itself. To the religious leaders who considered themselves guardians of the profane and the sacred, to the crowds who would have known the significance, these words would have revealed a scandalous glimpse into the mind of Jesus. All the more scandalous, Jesus later extends his communion with God the Father to his followers. “This, then, is how you should pray,” he says:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.(3)

Whether a Christian familiar with the prayer and titles of the Trinity or a secularist familiar with religious jargon, it might seem rather basic to approach the mysterious thought that Christ is Son and God is Father. “Heavenly Father,” “only Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are phrases over which our contemporary ears barely perk. Even those for whom the love of a father was absent or the love of a present father was treasured, the vast allowance of being able to call God ‘Father’ hardly seems a matter to consider. We might even lump it casually together with other generic religious tidbits. Yet it is not a quality inherent in other religions; it is, in fact, an obstruction to some, an enigma to others. The Christian confidence and comfort that God can be approached as Father is the unique and vital gift of the Son made available through the Spirit.

And such is the startling, radical message of the Christian story. As one theologian notes, “[T]his one word ‘Father,’ together with ‘Our,’ contain all these concepts [Creator, Lord, King, Lawgiver] yet at the same time reveals them as intimacy, as love, as a unique, unrepeatable and joyful union.”(4) What might it mean to you to have access to a Father who knows you by name, in whose house you are invited to be who you truly are—to live and work and play as God created you? What if there is indeed a Father who waits, who longs to gather his children together and take them into his arms? What if this is the communion for which you are made? Some will be transformed by love, some will be broken by love, some will refuse to be gathered by love. But God offers a place, positioned within the greater offer of adoption, the hope of communion, and the gift of participation in the kingdom. What if this is indeed our Father whose name is hallowed and whose kingdom we seek, whom we know through the Son and worship in the Spirit as children of the divine?

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 5:17.

(2) See Joachim Jeremias, Jesus and the Message of the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).

(3) Matthew 6:9-10.

(4) Alexander Schmemann, Our Father (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 19-20.

The 1748 essay “Of Miracles” by David Hume was influential in leading the charge against the miraculous, thoughts that were later sharpened (though also later recanted) by Antony Flew. Insisting the laws of a natural world incompatible with the supernatural, the new atheists continue to weigh in on the subject today. With them, many Christian philosophers and scientists, who are less willing to define miracle as something that must break the laws of nature, join the conversation with an opposing gusto. Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, for instance, suggests that miracles are not violations of the laws of nature but rather “exploration of a new regime of physical experience.”(1)

The possibility or impossibility of the miraculous fills books, debates, and lectures. What it does not fill is that moment when a person finds herself—rationally or otherwise—crying out for intervention, for help and assurance, indeed, for the miraculous. “For most of us” writes C.S. Lewis, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.”(2) To this I would simply add that often prayer is both: both the anguished cry of Gethsemane—”please, take this from me”—prayed at the foot of an impossible mountain.

Whether this moment comes beside a hospital bed, a dying marriage, a grave injustice, or debilitating struggle, we seem almost naturally inclined in some way to cry out for an intervening factor, something or someone beyond the known laws of A + B that sit defiantly in front of us. For my own family that moment came with cancer, complicated by well-intentioned commands to believe without doubt that God was going to take it away. When death took it away instead, like many others in our situation, our faith in miracles—and the God who gives them—were equally defeated.

In the throes of that heart-wrenching scene, every time I closed my eyes to pray, the vision of an empty throne filled my mind. It was something like the vision of Isaiah in the temple, only there was no robe and no body filling anything.(3) My prayers seemed to be given not a resounding “no,” but a non-answer, a cold, agonizing silence, which was also very much an answer. It was only years after the scene of my failed prayers for the miraculous that I was physically startled, again like Isaiah, at the thought that the throne was empty because the one who fills it had stepped down to sit beside us as we cried.

Such a miracle was nothing close to the one we were hoping for, and yet, years now after the sting of death, the incarnational gift of a God who comes near—in life, in suffering, even unto the grave—is inarguably the miracle far more profound. I don’t fully know why in the midst of our pain we felt alone and abandoned. Perhaps our eyes were too focused on the scene of the miracle we wanted, such that no other could be seen. “God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when God catches us, as it were, off our guard,” writes C.S. Lewis. “Our preparations to receive [God] sometimes have the opposite effect. Doesn’t Charles Williams say somewhere that ‘the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else‘?”(4)

And this somewhere else, this new regime, the place that catches us off-guard, is maybe even quite often right in front of us, near but unnoticed, miraculous but missed. In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, “I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”(5)

What if we were to start looking, not for miraculous signs and antepasts from beyond, but for a closer scene of miracle, for invitations to explore that new regime of physical existence brought about by the Incarnation, for foretastes of a banquet to which we are invited even today. Miracle and mystery may well be plainly before our eyes. For of course, Christianity is the story of the great Miracle, the story of the vicariously human Son of God coming not where we expected, but where we needed him most. Like the kingdom itself and the Christ who came to announce it, the scene of miracle may be nearer than we think.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John Polkinghorne, Faith, Science and Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 59.

(2) C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), 60.

(3) See Isaiah 6.

(4) Lewis, 117.

(5) Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 243.

The Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study, an American survey of more than 35,000 people from all 50 states, first undertaken in 2007, introduced those interested in demographic trends to a group of individuals known as “the nones.” In its follow-up study completed in 2014, ‘the nones’ are increasing. Almost a quarter of the U.S. population is unaffiliated with any religious group. More than any other demographic group, those aged 18-22 years old make up more than one-third of these ‘nones.’ They are as religiously unaffiliated as the older generations were affiliated.(1)

Of course, many theories are offered to explain this phenomenon. One theory suggests that younger adults grew disillusioned with organized religion when religion began to be associated with more conservative politics. Another theory offers that the shift reflects a broader trend away from social and community involvement. The most prominent theory suggests that this is simply one more sign of the growing secularization seen in most developed countries. Meanwhile, atheists, whose numbers are on the rise, interpret the decrease in faith as a triumph of reason.

While these studies are fascinating and important, and the theories as to the reasons for the decline in Protestant and Evangelical Protestant affiliation are worthy of serious thought, I don’t believe that the only conclusion we might draw from this report is one of triumph for skeptics or discouragement for Christians.

An ancient story perhaps suggests another perception. Thousands of years ago, a prophet heard a word from the Lord. The people would be exiled, the faithful forgotten, the land destroyed by gnawing locusts, and the armies of the nations would trample down those who remained. This vision came to the prophet Joel for the people of Judah. He saw the signs all around him and interpreted their warning. Exile was at hand.

Yet despite these harrowing warnings, the prophet also spoke of blessing, abundance after want, and the abiding presence of the God who cared for his people despite the ways things looked:

“Do not fear, o land, rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has done great things….I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, my great army which I sent among you….Thus you will know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God and there is no other; and my people will never be put to shame. And it will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all people; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. And even on the male and female servants I will pour out my Spirit in those days” (Joel 2:21-29).

Here, in the valley of want, the prophet Joel calls to the people to “return to the Lord with all your heart with fasting, weeping and mourning; rend your heart and not your garments….For the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness, and relenting of evil.” God’s grace and compassion will be demonstrated in the gift of the Spirit poured out lavishly on a most stubborn and willful people.

Hundreds of years later, there were another people who looked back at this ancient text from the prophet Joel and saw themselves as the recipients of this divine outpouring. They were the recipients of multiplied years. On these simple, peasant Galileans, small in number and in power, the Holy Spirit fell with tongues of fire and rushing wind. They proclaimed in native languages—not their own—the mighty deeds of God.(2) “And it shall be in the last days, God says, that I will pour forth my Spirit upon all people; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy” (Joel 2:28-29). The promise of God’s Spirit, outpoured and empowering the people fell on the feast of Pentecost, when harvest and in-gathering took place. To this relatively small gathering of individuals in Jerusalem: “…about three thousand were added to their numbers that day” (Acts 2:41). The Spirit falls and gathers home those who had been dispersed.

Of course, those initial followers, much like Joel before them, couldn’t see the ultimate horizon of the Church that was birthed that Pentecost. But these followers, small in number, were the first fruits of the outpoured Spirit, which would go forth into the uttermost parts of the earth. By the power of the Spirit, those first fruits would multiply into the Church, and the Church, the body of Christ, was unleashed into the world. The in-gathering of the nations, shown in nascent form at Pentecost, is fulfilled by the gospel going forth into the whole world through the presence and witness of the Church.

Pentecost asks those who despair or take triumph in changing demographics to consider that harvest and in-gathering are ever-present possibilities. Numbers may rise or fall, but influence does not have to wane. The earliest followers of Jesus were unleashed into the exile that was the Roman Empire. The smallness of their numbers didn’t thwart them from receiving the Spirit of the least and the last, so much so that their numbers and influence grew. Today, those who embrace the Son are the recipients of the power of the same Spirit. As we live into the kingdom by the power of this Spirit, the body of Christ can multiply with abundant fruit and harvest.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) The 2014 Religious Landscape Study, Pew Forum, conducted June 4-September 30, 2014.

(2) See Acts 2:1-13.

As a young girl, I had the unique opportunity to travel to South Africa. We stayed for a month in December when I was just five years old. My father’s parents and sister had immigrated to South Africa from Britain, and it was a rare opportunity to travel to see them. I can still remember the excitement of climbing into the Pan Am jet that would take me to what was surely a land full of adventure. The year was 1971.

Never in my young life had I experienced a place so unlike anything I knew. Growing up in the suburban Midwest of the U.S., my world was filled with snow and concrete, winters lasting long into April with rows and rows of houses lined with sidewalks. South Africa, by contrast, was a land of bright sunshine, vast horizons, beautiful ocean beaches, rugged mountains and diverse landscapes: from the dusty Kalahari Desert to the mountainous coast of Cape Town. Every place was a startling, new discovery of sights, smells, and experiences.

One such experience remains with me to this day. Thirsty after an afternoon at a trampoline park with my South African cousins, we went in search of public drinking fountains. Seeing just such an area not too far beyond where my tired legs could carry me, I ran ahead of the others in order to quench my thirst. Just as I leaned over to drink, a hand grabbed my shoulder and a loud, gruff voice told me not to drink from that fountain. It was for ‘coloreds’ only.

This was the first time, as I reflect back on the event, that I realized my skin color determined my standing in relation to others. I was too young and too thirsty to notice the posted placards on the fountains, or, sadly, to notice that there were only whites on all of the beaches where we frolicked as a family, only white diners in the restaurants where we ate, and only whites in most of the areas and venues we visited. In fact, there were posted designations for ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds’ at all the public places where the two groups might meet. I didn’t understand that apartheid, at that time, was the national policy.

For all the contrasts, here was a similarity between my suburban childhood and my visit to South Africa. Where I grew up, there were only two children of color in my elementary school, and one was of Asian heritage. I do not remember any African Americans in the suburban neighborhoods in which I grew up, and there was no racial diversity in my church. This segregation was far less obvious to me than the intentional policies that made up the apartheid system. Yet, hidden or intentional, the effects of a racist system were the same. How could I not conclude, as a young girl, that race determined where one lived, went to school, or worshipped?

A seminary internship working with young children in Atlanta, Georgia afforded me an alternative experience. I would be the only white person in my internship. I was surprised at how readily boundaries seemed to give way to acceptance. I didn’t seem to be as strange to them as they might have been had they visited me in the suburbs of my childhood. Sharing the same curly hair prompted one young girl to ask me if I was a ‘light-skinned black.’ I felt honored that racial differences were not the only thing she saw.

Yet, I would have been blind not to notice that the opportunities afforded to me simply were not available in this place. And while other principalities conspired with racism to decrease opportunity, I knew then that much of what I took for granted did not exist for these young children. A simple, nutritious breakfast—always available to me—consisted of a soda or a bag of tostada chips from the local Taco Bell for many of the kids I met here.

All these experiences—from the suburbs to South Africa to the urban South—reveal aspects of the human tendency to separate and divide. Yet, an alternative narrative is presented in the Christian gospel. The redemption offered in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is universally available. The reconciling work of Jesus Christ did not recognize the typical categories of human division and power but reached out to Jew and Greek, male and female, bond and free persons. The apostle Paul reminded the Ephesians that “you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded… and strangers to the covenants of promise….But now in Christ Jesus you who were formerly far off have been brought near….For Jesus is our peace, who made both groups into one, and broke down the dividing wall.”(1) The human tendency to separate and divide and control could be transformed to a new impulse, where peace and unity are found in Jesus Christ. But is this just something to hope for in an as yet unrealized future?

F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela could not have been more different but they worked together to help end apartheid in South Africa. Even their most significant differences (that went far beyond the color of their skin) did not thwart their work toward a peaceful transition of power—when most thought bloodshed and violence would ensue. Both men understood that unity and peace were not simply a vision of an other-worldly future, but something that could be undertaken even in the very messy, fraught, and difficult world of the here and now. De Klerk has said that “peace does not fare well where poverty and deprivation reign…. Peace is gravely threatened by inter-group fear and envy…. Racial, class, and religious intolerance and prejudice are its mortal enemies. In our quest for peace, we should constantly ask ourselves what we should do to create conditions in which peace can prosper.”(2)

Many can look at the world around them and despair over human differences which feel insurmountable. There is so much that can engender cynicism and a sense of futility. Yet, for those who would seek a different story, there is a house in which tearing down dividing walls that segregate human beings from each other and from God is the only appropriate response. Built upon the foundation that is Christ Jesus, this house has walls of restoration and renewal, forgiveness and reconciliation, generosity and grace. No one is shut out, and all may come in.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Ephesians 2:12-14, emphasis mine.

(2) F. W. de Klerk, Acceptance and Nobel Lecture, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1994.