Secure Connection and the Witch of Endor

Today I’m in 1 Samuel 28, which provides an eerie but insightful peek into another spiritual ecosystem: that of witchcraft. In this scene, King Saul consults a spiritist in a desperate attempt to gain direction and insight on the eve of a terrifying battle against the Philistines. In this passage we see the irony of Saul who had in his zeal for the spiritual purity of his people expelled spiritists from Israel now seeking the guidance of a witch. I can imagine the shadowy room in a hovel lit by a couple smoking lanterns. Saul, weak from fasting but frantic sits across from the disheveled woman awakened in the middle of the night. After assuring her she would not bear the consequences of channeling the dead, he asks her to bring up his former mentor, Samuel. Only the woman could see the shadowy figure of Samuel coming up from the ground and she channeled his voice. 

After confirming the woman was really seeing Samuel by asking her about his appearance, Saul explained his desperate plight to Samuel: “I am in great distress,” Saul said. “The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has departed from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do.”

Samuel has no encouragement for Saul and assures him that “tomorrow, you will be here with me.” Saul collapses with grief and exhaustion. It is only with the insistence of his companions that Saul is willing to receive the kindness of the spiritist in feeding him what may have been Saul’s last meal. The next day, both Saul and his sons were killed in battle.

What strikes me in this passage is the contrast of Saul in chapter 10 and the one we find 18 chapters later. In 1 Samuel 10, Samuel gives Saul the blessing of kingship with the anointing of oil and a kiss saying, “Has not the Lord anointed you ruler over his inheritance?” Then Samuel gives an unusually descriptive prediction of events to come that would assure Saul that God was working and anointing him for this task. All this things were fulfilled with divine precision, including a supernatural overriding of Saul’s natural will in an Acts-like visitation of the Holy Spirit, Saul’s prophesying, and transformation into “a different person.”

I love what Samuel says to Saul by way of instruction: “Once these signs are fulfilled, do whatever your hand finds to do, for God is with you.” Don’t you love that? When God is with us, transforming your essential character, we can essentially do what comes to us, trusting the security of our position in God’s presence and the transformation of our person.

So what went wrong with Saul?

As I think about the episode in chapter 28, I can see the ways in which Saul’s earlier spiritual journey was consistent with his final conclusion. I believe Saul found himself dabbling in witchcraft because of a series of choices, but none of these choices were inconsistent with Saul’s basic desires and natural inclinations. And in some ways, the episode in chapter 10 flows naturally into chapter 28. Think of the things Saul would may have quietly understood from his unusual spiritual encounter in chapter 10

1. God speaks to me primarily through someone else.
2. The pursuit of spiritual power is connected to my security and blessing in my calling.
3. God’s power is separate from the free exercise of my will.

What we see its a rapid amplification of destiny affirmed by a dramatic encounter with God but not accompanied by the slow formation of character through a consistent personal relationship with God. Is is any wonder that when Samuel dies, Saul seems desperate to connect to God in the only way he knows how: through somebody else? In contrast, our early images of King David are of a young shepherd cultivating a love relationship with God in private and channeling the power of God through the exercise of his will (i.e. his willingness to go against Goliath).

Although Saul did not have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a New Testament sense, I think we can draw many parallels to the ways in which we process our relationship with God as Christians. 

How many of us have had an experience of God through another person, whether a friend or a public figure… and then believed that the best manifestation of God’s presence would only come through the intervention or guidance of a specific mentor, friend, or spiritual figure? While I think Christians are supposed to act as bridges (priests) to connect others to the heart and presence of God, I also see friends getting stuck in the emotional belief that they are somehow unqualified or not “anointed” enough to receive a strong connection with God through their private relationship with him. Maybe the most common manifestation of this is that the role of praying, whether for a meal, a church service, or a sick person often falls to the pastor because people assume that a pastor’s prayers are more likely to be answered that that of “ordinary” people. I’ve been guilty of this myself at times and while I do think we can receive specific blessings attached to the anointing and faith of certain people, we should be careful about placing the weight of our spiritual wellbeing on the shoulders of a “more spiritual” person.

I’m also mindful that the pursuit of the miraculous as a source of encouragement and security in our calling and destiny is a strong temptation for many of us. We all experience disconnection and discouragement in our journey at time. But instead of pressing into the discomfort of those emotions and talking with God about it, we often go hunting for a sign or a demonstration of power to assure us that we are still blessed, chosen, anointed, even saved. We end up quietly testing God to see if really is there with us. In one sense this is natural. We all look for signs in our relationships that we are safe, favored, and accepted. If those signs are never there, our relationship has a problems. But often we look for assurance only in the ways in which we are conditioned to receive them. 

I think about my relationship with my oldest daughter Annabel. There is nothing I want more than for her to rest in my secure affection and love for her. I want her to know that I’ll bend over backwards to care for, protect, and provide for her. But she is hardwired to receive love through gifts. But if that becomes the only way for her to know my favor and affection, then she’ll only feel loved a few times a year. As a dad, when I see my daughter testing my love, feeling insecure in my affection for her, I feel an intense love-anger; a jealousy for her to know that I like her, that I’m on her side. I imagine God feels that towards me as well. But as long as I’m testing our connection through my experience of the overwhelmingly supernatural, any hope of an actually secure connection is ill-fated.

Finally, I think we have a common misconception that a genuine God encounter should override my will. For instance, I prayed for a long time that God would strike me with the gift of tongues. I was sympathetic towards spiritual gifts though I hadn’t experienced much myself. I think I assumed that anything supernatural would have to come through the overriding of my will. Certainly I spoke with some folks who described their experiences in this way. I figured if God wanted me operating in the supernatural, he knows where I live and he knows how to get ahold of me. But the more I began to operate in the supernatural, the more I found out what a unique dance it is between our decisions and God’s power. Without God’s power, our efforts quickly become manipulation. But somehow, God has wired us to channel his power more often than not through the mechanism of our choices. So I pray for people even when I don’t “feel the Spirit” and often the Spirit shows up! I make decisions based on my best understanding of God’s heart and often discover “random coincidences” that affirm God’s presence in that decision. While I try to stay pliable to God totally changing my schedule, often when I ask him what he wants me to do that day, he’ll simply say, “You’re plan is good. Go for it.”

I think we often want God to show up without the exercise of discipline. We hear crazy stories of people encountering God in amazing ways. What we don’t hear about is the months and years of faithful Christian discipline that many of these people went through in pursuit of a deeper life with God. The exercise of discipline is not our way of manipulating God. It’s our way of “knocking” as we trust that the door will opened to us. As I think over the tremendous growth both in my internal reality and the anointing on my life I’ve experienced the last couple years, I realize that it has been accompanied by the greatest exercise of personal discipline I’ve ever practiced. It started small, but the more God responded, the greater my discipline became. The secret is that at the time, it didn’t feel like discipline. My brain actually processed it as delight. And in the end what I have is a wonderfully secure friendship with God.

We say we want God to take over, to override our faculties, and in the short term that may feel good. But I think God knows that to build a close, secure relationship with us, it needs to be reciprocal and private in a long-term relationship that slowly loses its conditionality and takes us deep into the language relational delight. In that space, we flow freely in his power and security of our sanctification as we walk with Him.

Spirit-Led Discipleship: What's in a Name?

Friends, today I continued a conversation with God I've been having for some time which I believe will become a book He and I will write together. It's a book on making disciples under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. I hope to paint a vivid picture of Christ's disciple-building ministry as an essentially Spirit-driven affair. Chapter 1 is all about identity and the significance of the gospel records giving us the names of the 12  disciples (Mark 3:16-19). I hope to discuss some of treasures buried in the biblical concept of naming and its significance for the discipleship as well as disciple building. I hope to also paint a picture of the ways in which the names of the disciples defined their greatest points of struggle and redemption. But to get there, I found I had to dig back into the Genesis account. Here is what I've come up with so far. If this topic is of interest to you, I'd value your feedback and ideas!

It begins with identity, with calling: calling by name.

Naming is no small affair. Naming was one of the first jobs given to the first human: “Now look here Adam. I’ve made all these animals. Now I want you to name them.” You might say that naming was an act of co-creation with God. After all, in Genesis we see that after forming the animals from dust, God brought them to the man “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19). God, who formed man from dust and breathed the life of His own Spirit into the man’s nostrils is waiting on the edge of his seat to see what identity this dust-and-spirit man would assign to each of his creatures. So Adam, resting in the creative power of God’s life reverberating through his bones calls out each creature: giraffe, vole, hippopotamus, egret.

This act of will, this assigning of identity became a prophetic act. As Adam’s mind comingled naturally with the mind of His Father[1], out came a name. And the name stuck. God honored the identity given by the man and caused that identity to weave itself in and through the individual stories of each creature. Eugene Peterson eloquently writes:

The first use of language in the Garden is naming animals and birds... Naming identifies. Naming, when done well, captures something of the essence of the life so named.[2]

This is truer still of the names we give each other: Helen, Jason, Ichabod, Harold. Names are powerful things. Names are relational. Names tie our journey to another person’s destiny. That’s why so many names in the bible relate to the mother’s story or the circumstances surrounding the child’s birth. Consider for instance, the ways in which the children of Leah are named in relationship to her ongoing quest to win the affection of her husband. Reuben: the Lord has seen my misery. Simeon: the Lord heard that I am not loved. Levi: my husband will become attached to me.[3]

The first words spoken about a human by another human are relational. They are words of intimate recognition and delight:

“This is now bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called ‘woman,’

for she was taken out of man” (Gen 2:23)

Man’s first recorded words are poetry, “our basic intimacy language—the language used by gurgling and cooing infants, by lovers, by pray-ers.”[4] In this exultant love sonnet, Adam finds himself in the emerging story of his partner. He identifies her in relational terms. He first recognizes her according to her position toward himself: she has his bones. Eve Bonewoman, the perfect complement to Adam Dustman.

She is ezer k’negdo, the beautiful “opposite-yet-alongside helper-and-deliverer.” She is a “life-saver!”[5] She completes the man in fully expressing the image of God through intimate relationship. Sex and companionship in reciprocal unity of will and purpose become the enduring word picture of God’s relationship with His people.

In chapter 3, Adam assigns his wife her proper name on the heels of God’s prophetic word about their destiny after the fall. She would be Eve, “because she would become the mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20). It is a present designation pointing to a future reality. Eve would become the mother of the living, but the way in which she would actualize her name would be a grand milieu of pain and redemption.

A Name is a Battleground

Adam Dustman was a gardener, a master groundskeeper. In the context of unashamed union with his Father, he could tend any garden with ease. A seed fallen to the ground would spring from the earth in a tender shoot, impossibly green and delighted to grow as it breathed in the life of God swimming through all creation. Adam knew when to water, prune, harvest, and replant. Large firm tomatoes jostled each other as they ripened on the vine, eager to be plucked and enjoyed for their sweetness. Crisp apples virtually rained down from overhead, wanting nothing but to nourish God’s creatures and recreate themselves in a hundred new plants. Adam was good at this. But one day, God’s groundskeeper bit into the wrong fruit with a disobedient heart massaged by complacency. Connection ended. Shame entered the world. When it did, his assigned name (Adam: “Red”, as in “Man of the Red Earth”) became a battleground. Now the earth from which he was formed and which had so eagerly yielded itself to him became an adversary and an obstacle to him. Just as his heart hardened against God in disobedience, the soil itself hardened against the man. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”[6]

For her part, the woman ate the fruit hungering to be something she believed she could never be: like God, knowing good and evil.[7] Yet Eve was like God in the sense of bearing his image. Yet in striving to achieve through works what was essentially hers by grace, connection with both God and her husband was lost. Now striving and pain would become the battlefield of her identity. “With painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”[8]

Yet God would redeem their names. The woman would indeed become the “mother of all the living”. And though she would bear the pain of childbirth, we see a glimpse of God’s redemptive purposes in her joyful surprise at the birth of Cain: “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” In this exclamation she properly ascribes to God his role in the creative act and she rejoices in the miracle of life being brought fort from life. Ultimately one of her own decedents would require to help of the Lord to “bring forth” the Man, who would redeem all things including her own sin. Adam too would find a reminder of his original earthy identity in every bite of food his family enjoyed. The image of God within him was marred but not lost entirely. One day, a descendant of Adam named “The Last Adam” would come as an imperishable seed of God’s final redemption, planted in Golgotha’s red earth in a newly-dug tomb surrounded by (of all things) a garden,[9] and springing defiantly to life after 3 days in order to bear life-giving “spirit fruit”. As Paul says, “’The first man Adam became a living being;’ the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.”[10] Names are God’s idea. Names are beautiful. Names carve out the spaces in which our identities come under the greatest attack and find the greatest restoration.

---

[1] I use Father instead of creator in keeping with Adam’s designation as “the son of God” in the geneology of Christ (Lk 3:38)

[2] Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. (Grand Rapids: Eerdsman, 2005), p. 80.

[3] Gen 29:31-35

[4] Peterson, p. 81.

[5] http://www.ransomedheart.com/daily-reading/ezer-kenegdo

[6] Gen 3:19

[7] Gen 3:6

[8] Gen 3:16

[9] John 19:41

[10] 1 Cor 15:45

Connection is the Content: Dynamics of Conversation with God

Okay, this post may come off as mystical bordering on nutty. I’m writing it hoping that it sparks something deep in a handful of people… Bear with me friends. I’ll do my best to get this across to you.

God is teaching me something today about listening to him. But it is hard to put in words. Because the way he taught me this lesson was through a string of seemingly random but eerily “rhyming” passages of scripture deposited gently in my brain in the midst of an unusually strong connection with him. Jesus and I had a long conversation this morning as I mentally saw him sitting across from me and the connection between us hummed almost electrically. The conversation seemed at first to take a number of detours, but by the end, a few central themes were communicated with crystal clarity in a way my mind was able to grasp.

1. I’m teaching you how I wired your mind to hear from me. This is how it works. No exceptions. No shortcuts. “For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him” (Isaiah 14:27)
2. As you are sanctified, my mind increasingly works in conjunction with your mind. “We have the mind of Christ,” says Paul. Joshua heard and exercised my will in a lot of ways: angelic visitations, a “sounds like” about Gilgal, an oath-in-faith against the rebuilding of Jericho which I honored, and the plain exercise of his redeemed will against 5 enemy kings which became a tremendous symbol pointing my death and resurrection (Josh 10:27).
3. I rarely do things the same way twice. So listen carefully each time and obey (Josh 8:27).
4. Yes, I care about accuracy. And as you grow, your listening will become more accurate. BUT, there is a way to miss out on complete accuracy yet still feel as connected or even MORE connected to my presence than before. To hear better you have to pay attention and press in. It’s not safe to make assumptions. This is a paradox because you will need to trust the intuition I placed in you, but never make assumptions. My presence with Joshua mattered more than the perfect accuracy of His hearing (Josh 6:27).
5. Pay attention to your impressions, to the coincidences of the play you’ve been acting in even before you became aware of it. Watch how the funny little things that happened earlier this week, even this morning are woven into the story I’m writing in and through you when you are finally paying attention.
6. Therefore don’t be afraid and don’t let your heart be troubled. I’ve given you the peace of my Presence. That peace will overwhelm the anxiety of whether you are perfectly understanding me or not. Don’t worry (John 14:27). You are circling in on the truth of the matter. That the thing is this: I do not dispense truth. I AM Truth. True connection and true ideas…. sometimes the line will be fuzzier than you like. But over the course of a life time these will come together quite beautifully.

To explain all of this well would take a very long post, but the end result is I’m learning these lessons very well through a communication style the Holy Spirit often uses with me that feels simultaneously rambling and random, yet also profoundly succinct and effective. Just another fun paradox to wrestle with.

Jesus has been leading me to “27” verses lately… especially Colossians 1:27. And actually, as I review it now I realize, this ties in perfectly to what I’m learning too! “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” You see? The content of Paul’s proclamation was a single mystery made known to the gentiles: Christ in the believer. The believer as the tabernacle of God’s Presence. The hope of glory as the outward sign of that mysterious truth doing its work. Our positional connection through Christ as those in whom God himself dwells sums up the content of God’s “gloriously rich mystery now revealed.” The connection is the content. Get it? Is your brain sizzling yet?

So anyway. 27. Right. I resist anything that smacks of superstition. So when God led me to John 14:27, I thought it was a bit too obvious. But in fact, it was dead on. I’m feeling anxious about this whole listening exercise after all… but I should remember he has given me his peace through connection with Him. And that connection trumps the anxiety about going off the deep end spiritually, about hearing wrong.

Then he pointed me back to what I read in Joshua 5 this morning and I shrugged… “I don’t know Lord.” But that whole thing about Gilgal really stood out when I read it again. I tried to put on Joshua’s shoes. What does the word Gilgal (Hebrew for “rolling”) have to do with God rolling away the reproach of Egypt? Did Joshua actually hear an audible voice say, “Because I’ve rolled away the reproach of Egypt?” Or did he get a mental image of a rolling stone and hear the words as a soft impression in His mind? I don’t know. But if it was something inside his head, then God is making a word play, a “sounds like” and Joshua has to make to connection between the word “rolling” and the rolling away of shame and the reproach of the Egyptian slavery period. 

By the way… this repealing of the shame of slavery happens on the other side of the Jordan. The first generation that was free of slavery (and showing some signs of regenerated existence in things like sandals that didn’t wear out and 2 million people with “not one feeble person among their tribes”) but still slaves in their minds had finally died away and the new generation was circumcised after crossing the Jordan on dry ground. The shame of slavery was at last rolled away and from that moment forward, Israel started winning all their battles and claiming their inheritance. Can you see the parallels to the kingdom in which we now live as Jesus people? The yoke of our sin-slavery was broken by Jesus. That’s just true. 

But much of our heart still wandered out the desert as though we were still slaves to sin. When those rebellious, mentally-enslaved bits of us finally fully die out (sanctification), we cross the Jordan and circumcise our hearts to God as we begin to walk by the Spirit into the reality of our inheritance. We’re not perfect, but Christ is perfect in us. And from that moment forward, we begin winning our battles and claiming our inheritance in the Kingdom as children born of the Spirit in lockstep with the Spirit (Romans 8). This is the reality of life in the Spirit and Joshua symbolizes it beautifully. When you live in the Spirit, you stop asking whether that was God or bad tacos. You trust the connection. You know you’ll get it wrong sometimes but that’s part of the journey. You stay humble. But ultimately you trust the friendship. I think it is interesting that sometimes when I hear God wrong these days, I feel the connection with God gets stronger or at least is not diminished. I don’t need to evaluate or judge what went wrong like I used to. And I feel him still very close to me. What’s up with that? I think it has to do with me having the mind of Christ: his mind getting all mixed up in mine as “Christ is formed” in me. It’s about union, connection. And I think it has something to do with the rhyming thing.

“But seriously God. What’s up with the 27 thing?” I asked puzzled. 

“I like to rhyme with myself,” he responded. “It’s a game I like to play.”

“Okay then. What’s next?”

“14:27.”

“Joshua 14:27?? Uh oh. No such verse Lord.”

“Isaiah 14:27 silly. Not Joshua. Pay attention.”

There’s a funny story from one of John Wimber’s meeting. Someone on his ministry team saw an image of a green hose. He got up and said, “somebody in this room tripped over a garden hose and got injured. Come up to the front God wants to heal you.” Though he shared the word several times nobody got up. The man was confused. He was sure God showed him a green hose. After the meeting, a man from the audience came up and said, “I tripped over a green air hose at work and hurt myself. But you said “garden hose” so I assumed the word wasn’t for me! The man with the word should have said, “Someone tripped over a green hose” and not assumed it was a garden hose.

I was reading in Joshua. I was on a roll. God said “14:27” and I barely noticed that he didn’t say “Joshua 14:27”. Only when I stopped and asked did he say “Isaiah”. I’ve got to pay attention and I’ve got to press in. The other thing he used to illustrate this was Joshua 8:(you guessed it)27… Which just shows Israel carrying off plunder from Ai, which was the OPPOSITE of what God told them to do in Jericho. “I rarely do the same thing twice. Pay attention.” And sure enough, we hear God speak in all kinds of different ways. Joshua sure did. And what he tells us to do often stands in contrast to what he told us to do yesterday. This is why it is said that many new movements of God’s Spirit in the world are persecuted most severely by the proponents of God’s movement in the previous generation. We get stuck on how God worked before, and we totally miss how God is working NOW.

One last aside: Look at the parallels between the Joshua 10 and the passion/resurrection narrative: http://validambiguity.com/2017/01/21/jesus-the-gentile-king/

The point is, Jesus goes into the cave with our enemies, the “principalities and powers” and there, “having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 2:15). Jesus and the 5 kings were hung on poles, which carried a curse under the law. They all died by sunset. They all were buried in a tomb. But those kings aren’t coming out once the stone is rolled over the mouth of the cave. But when Jesus comes out, he “rolls away” the reproach of our slavery, emerging alive and well while the enemies of our inheritance stay in the grave permenantly. Again, just a thought.

Wrapping up my conversation, I was still a bit confused about all the seemingly random and spastic bits of revelation, though the theme was emerging regarding the primacy of right connection as the only pathway to right truth (Jesus being the truth and all that). The Spirit’s final word to me was to point out the book on my desk. It was Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in a Thousand Places. I found it in the basement this morning and thought I would pull it out to read later. I hardly remember why I was down there, but I found the book buried in a random box and decided to bring it upstairs with me. Jesus said, “flip to page 237.” Okay… 2… (3)… 7… In one paragraph, Peterson elegantly sums up what I was just learning this morning about holding conversation with the Holy Spirit. Peterson is talking about Christ’s conversation with God in John 17. He says:

“The conversation is rambling and unsystematic. This is not what we ordinarily think of as good teaching. But Jesus is not making things clear, smoothing out ambiguities; he is making them vivid, pulsing. There is no outline and there are no transitions. Definitions are lacking. What the conversation does is immerse us in the presence of another, the presence of Jesus readying us for the Spirit. We are soon listening more to who he is than what he says; we are drawn into this seamless web of relational attentiveness, leaving and sending, sensing within ourselves the pervasive, soul-permeating continuity between the absent Jesus and the present Spirit.”

Yes indeed. This is the dynamic of conversation with God as I’m experiencing it today: He is not making things clear in the sense of smoothing out ambiguities and giving me a pithy 3-point takeaway complete with PowerPoint slides. But in my Spirit I sense connection to Truth as something “vivid, pulsing.” And I find that at the end of the day, whether I’m hearing God exactly right every moment…. “We are soon listening more to who he is than what he says.”

Gentleness: The Feather and the Hammer

I was thinking about gentleness today. This is a value taught all across the New Testament. But among many followers of Jesus today, gentleness has been replaced by confidant assertiveness and aggression in the name of “taking a stand”. But in Colossians, gentleness is listed among the virtues that make up the patchwork garment of love that “binds them all together in perfect unity.” Check it out:

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (Colossians 3:11-13 NIV)

So why gentleness? I think gentleness is an expression of both humilty and faith: humility that we can’t really change or control a person or situation in a satisfactory way... and faith that if we press into the weakness of a gentle posture, God can do much more through us than we could ever ask or imagine. Gentleness isn’t weakness. It’s recognizing our limitations while also recognizing God’s limitless power at work in us.

I was thinking about a revival meeting I attended a couple months ago. At the time, I had never been to such a meeting, but I was so hungry for God’s love and power to more fully invade me, I was more open than ever before. I was the 6’3 Norwegian in the front row of a large African American church in Memphis, worshipping with new freedom and probably looking quite foolish... but for once, not caring one bit! I could feel God’s presence like a bright light in my body.

The second night at the altar call, the visiting preacher called up anyone feeling God’s presence. Well that was me. I jumped into line at the last minute. When the preacher came to me, he gently put his hand on my forehead and prayed a very sincere prayer for God to fill me in a new way. I felt something liquid like a bright light flow through my body all the way into my arms and legs. I felt like my whole body was illuminated! After his prayer, I crumpled like a rag doll and spent 45 minutes on the floor, my hands shaking, my whole body feeling the euphoria of God’s love and power on a new level. I could have gotten up if I had to but I didn’t want to! The feeling was incredible. One of the sweet things that happened on the floor was that a lady came up to me and lovingly stroked my back while praying quietly for me under her breath. It was very tender and though I never opened my eyes to look at her, I felt God’s love through her prayer. God started saying new things to me there on the floor that continue to shape my journey today.

The third night, something different happened. I was feeling the Lord’s Presence when the preacher called people up. But this time, when the preacher came to me, he called to the pastor sitting on stage to come pray for me. I saw the pastor leap up from his seat and run to the edge of the stage. He shouted “FIRE!!!” and literally shoved me backwards. I went to the floor and lay there for some time, but God’s Presence dissipated immediately. That liquid feeling of light was gone, although I did feel peaceful. I wasn’t offended by what the pastor did, but I recognized that the spirit was different.

I think one dynamic the Lord was showing me through that experience was this:

When we touch a person or situation with gentleness (whether physically or metaphorically), the Lord is able to touch that person or situation with real power. But when we touch people or situations aggressively, we don’t leave room for the Spirit’s work and we open the door for confusion. Was that God? Or was is just human manipulation? What we touch with a feather, the Lord touches with a hammer.

Gentleness is not tentativeness or timidity. Gentleness is very different from those things! I’m talking about a radical boldness and courage that doesn’t need to exert itself to get things done. This is because we know deep inside that the power to get stuff done doesn’t lie in us! It lies in the Father. And He gives us the power for all things, whether it is getting through the slog of our workday or praying for a friend with cancer. And when we see God swinging his hammer through our gentle touch, it makes us so joyful! Suddenly there’s no pressure in the Christian life. We don’t have to exert or strain or perform for Jesus. All we need to do is rest in intimacy with the Father, seek His heart and direction, walk in gentle humility.... and see God change the world through us!