Where Does It Come From?

June 15, 1977 -- A wondrous happening that changed the path of my entire life.  I was hospitalized for surgery, with many, many accompanying worries and fears.  But early that morning, a young girl laid hands on me and prayed for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and suddenly I experienced liquid love being poured on me from on high, beginning at the top of my head and slowly spreading down my shoulders and throughout my entire body -- a love and peace that I had yearned for but could not manufacture for myself:  If you knew the gift of God, Jesus had said, you would ask, and it would be given to you -- a spring of living water, springing up to eternal life. 
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And the peace, the calm, the love continued throughout the surgery, during which I was awake and consulting with my doctor.  It continued all during the day, as the nurses attempted to give me pain medicine, which I didn't need and continued to refuse.  It continued during the night and the next day, when I got out of bed and walked into other rooms, looking for people in pain, with whom I could share the gift I had been given.  It continued when I went home to recuperate.

In the meantime, I had reached over to the bedside table and found a Gideon Bible.  Without any knowledge or plan on my part, the Bible fell open to the Acts of the Apostles, and I began reading.  It was the story of Pentecost.  As I read, I was amazed at what the words were describing:  "This is what just happened to me!" my spirit cried out!  "This is what I'm experiencing right now!"  --- not something I could have imagined, manufactured, or even thought to ask for!  Not something I would have even believed could have happened!  But there it was: suddenly my mourning had been changed into dancing; my constant fear had evaporated into joy and euphoria; my oppression had fled away, and faith had come instead.  I was the woman at the well, though I was not familiar with the story at the time, and would not have understood had someone told me at that moment.

Six weeks later I went back to my doctor, the one who first had prayed for me to receive the Holy Spirit.  At that time, I had received the "first touch of the Spirit," but could not continue the experience on my own. Now I was worried that I would allow the Spirit to depart from me through careless, indifference, or sin.  I did not know how to make it continue.  I needed teaching and the support of a community, but I was still very much on my own.  My doctor laughed:  "You don't 'have the Holy Spirit'," he reassured me; "He 'has' you -- and He's not letting you go.  Wherever you go, He's going with you."  Amazingly, with the 'second touch,' I discovered a community ready and waiting to receive me, encourage me, support me, teach me.  Amazing!  Wondrous!  Everything had been provided ahead of time, without my knowledge or understanding. 

Jesus told Nicodemus:  You do not understand the path of the wind -- where it comes from or where it is going; it is the same with the Holy Spirit; [He blows wherever He pleases] -- (my addition).  The "Spirit" -- or "breath of God" blows wherever he wills; we cannot control it, direct it, or even understand it.  It does not come from us; it comes down from above.  We can receive it; we can ask for it; we cannot manufacture or direct it.  We can be open to it; we can desire it.  We cannot blow the breath of God into our own nostrils.  We cannot 'become a living soul' by being 'a good person,' by 'good works' or by being upright citizens.  In fact, according to Julian of Norwich and others, the weaker, the more pitiful, the more hopeless we are, the greater we draw the mercy of God to us, just as the compassion of a mother is more drawn to the child that is sickly or weak.

Where does the Spirit of God come from?  From the heart of God, the Mercy of God, the Love and Compassion of God on the poor, the suffering, the 'little ones,' those who cannot help themselves.  Henry David Thoreau wrote a little poem in the 1800's: 

The work we do for God,

God blesses;

The work we call our own,

God leaves alone.

 

In my own case, I always thought I was a fairly competent person, able to handle almost anything.  It took three children and six years of no sleep at night to convince me that I was helpless, incompetent, and incoherent to manage life on my own.  Then, when I knew that no strength, no wisdom, no understanding, no peace, no love, no competency would ever come from within myself, the Sprit of the Lord rushed in to fill me with His own Peace, His own Love and Goodness, His own understanding, His own Revelation/ Word, His own Truth. 

 

Christ was formed in my emptiness by the Spirit of God, just as He was formed in the empty womb of the Virgin by the spoken Word and the Rushing Spirit/Breath of God hovering over her emptiness/ littleness/ humility. A new Creation was shaped in me by the same Word and Breath of the Most High, and now "My spirit magnifies the Lord, and my soul rejoices in God my Savior!"  Once we have experienced the new birth, we can never again be drawn by the empty philosophies and theories of man.  It is as though Hans Solo's spaceship has leaped into hyper-space, and we have left behind the planet of evil on which we were raised, the only one we knew existed up to that moment. 

 

We do want to return to our planet of origin, but now with "Good News" -- that Jesus, the Christ, has come to our planet, has taken up all the causes of our lives (Lamentations 3:58), and has given us cause to celebrate, has removed from us the pain described by Jeremiah:

 

My eyes fail from weeping,

I am in torment within,

my heart is poured out on the ground

because my people are destroyed,

because children and infants faint

in the streets of the city (Lamentions 2:11).

 

Now as the compassion of God is formed in our hearts on a daily basis, as our new life grows and develops and deepens daily, we too pray that the Word of God and the Breath of God will enter the lives of those around us, delivering them from evil just as He has delivered us!