My blessing for the day...

[Mike Vande]

My blessing for the day is the Holy Spirit. I really didn’t have a lot of church upbringing as a kid. I remember going to Sunday school a few times when I was really young, like 4 or 5. There was in a church near the elementary school there in Bethany, Nebraska, where we lived back then, and I recall at least one Sunday there.
 
When we would visit the grandparents, we went to church and Sunday school with them, and sometimes Vacation Bible School, if it was in the summer. So, I was semi-exposed to the church milieu as a youngster.

From about 7 to my teens, I didn’t get to church much. My parents didn’t go, and I was just as happy spending Sundays doing as I pleased. Getting dressed up and sitting through a sermon I didn’t understand or care about didn’t figure large on my list of favorite activities.
 
When I was a teenager, Mom decided she wanted to go to church. It was okay with me if she wanted to go; it didn’t really affect me, or so I thought. But, Mom also decided that her three children should accompany her on these Sunday morning excursions, scrubbed, combed and dressed in their most uncomfortable finery. That did affect me, and I was not so laissez faire about that.
 
There was no way out of going; she had Dad behind her on it. That effectively ended all discussion on the topic, unless one was really interested in renewing acquaintance between Dad’s cotton-web Air Force belt and their posterior. Mind you, Dad didn’t go himself; he drove us to church, dropped us off, and came back later to pick us up, but it was safer not to ask him how he was getting out of it.

For, Mom, "church" meant the denomination her parents attended, the Church of Christ, the one with no instrumental music. In those days, it seemed like Sunday school was more of an afterthought to the church planners at the denominational level. There wasn’t the plethora of brightly colored, kid-oriented, fun-looking Sunday school material there is today, even among less somber denominations than the C of C. And, the teachers, while probably well-intentioned, were not really up on child psychology or teaching methods, even the woefully inadequate teaching methods of those days. I asked one of them what “circumcised” meant after reading the word in the Bible lesson for that Sunday, and he got mad at me.  Who knew?
 
All I remember from the Sunday sermons I had to endure there was that the preacher was ticked off that people would rather watch the Smothers Brothers than come hear him on Sunday nights.  Well, if he had The Who smashing guitars and amps on his platform, or a cool music video over the drum solo from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, maybe he’d get a larger crowd…
 
Eventually, I got permission to attend services with my best friend Jim at the local Baptist Church. Mom was okay with it as long as I went somewhere, and at least Jim and I had each other to kid around with if the sermon went on too long. And then, we moved away from there, and back to our home town. Somehow, church attendance went by the wayside for all of us.

I had a brief flirtation with Christianity in 1971. That was the year I graduated from high school, and when I met my friend Steve. He’d been turned on to Jesus in a big way while pretending to be a hippie in Texas the year before.  When he came back home, he was all lit up like a neon sign that said "JESUS!" he had a major effect on a lot of people, me included. But then I met a girl who liked making out, and that kinda put God on the backburner for me.
 
I didn’t have much to do with Christianity, other than to laugh at it, for about 10 years after that. I forgot all the stuff I had been told or read; I would have said it was all pretty much out of my head, if I had thought about it at all.
 
But there aren’t many atheists in foxholes, and when I discovered I was at war for my life with alcohol and drugs, it didn’t take me long to start praying, and very sincerely. It was then that I recognized the Holy Spirit as a factor in my life. All the stuff that I had heard about God and the Bible as a kid started coming back up in my mind, courtesy of Him. It sure wasn’t because I had memorized it all, far from it. But whole scripture passages started coming out of my mouth, stuff that I had no reason to know except I had heard a Sunday school teacher read it years and years before.
 
I started remembering other things, too; there had been a series of fairly serious Christians somewhere near me during pretty much the whole time I was doing my heavy drinking and doping. I know a few of them were praying for me. Then I started remembering this person or that person who had showed up at just the right time for one thing or another, and the line seemed to just keep going back, as far back as I could recall. It started to become apparent that God had been with me my whole life, waiting for me to get to the point where I could really reach out for Him.
 
Now, I had heard the term “Holy Ghost” a lot growing up, but beyond knowing there was something called the Trinity that had a lot to do with God, I had never known what was up with that. It was just one more thing the grown-ups talked about that had little or nothing to do with what I was into, and they seemed to think it was something I was too young to understand about anyway, So, I didn’t think about it much. I guess I got used to thinking that way, because ghosts, Holy or otherwise, didn’t really occupy much of my thinking.
 
But the night after my conversion experience took place, I was asked if I wanted to be baptized in the Holy Ghost. Now, the only experience I’d had with that phrase was at a rather strange church meeting my friend Steve had taken me to some years prior. Some lady came up from behind me while I was on my knees praying with my eyes closed, and (GASP!) put her hands on my shoulders! No one had ever touched me, on the shoulders or anywhere else, inside a church building before, and it shocked me. A lot.
 
She said “SON! I CAN FEEL IT ON YA! DO YA WANNA BE BAPTIZED IN THE HOLY GHOST?” All I really wanted right then was for her to take her hands off my shoulders and quit yelling in my ear. She stayed for a little while, and then moved on, I guess because I didn’t respond.
 
Eventually, I regained my cookies and looked around the room. I saw people standing, some with hands in the air, eyes closed, tears rolling down some faces, beatific smiles on others, some praying for each other, some laughing together, nothing much I was familiar with in a church setting. In the years that followed that meeting, I heard from various folks that it was emotionalism, exciteable people worked into a frenzy by the personal magnetism of a manipulative demagogue, maybe even some demonic influence in there, but it was certainly not anything of God.

So, 10 years later, when I was asked after an AA meeeting by this kindly middle-aged lady if I wanted to be baptised in the Holy Spirit, I was a tad leery of it. I had just got something going with God the night before, and I didn't want to mess that up. But despite the misinformation I had absorbed, that night God touched me in a way I could never deny. There was no emotional appeal to the senses, no repetitive music lulling me into a state of autohypnosis, just two annointed Christian women with their finger tips touching my shoulders, praying for me. The answer to their prayers and mine was amazingly powerful.

The result was that I became physically intoxicated, what some folks call drunk in the Spirit. That really freaked me out, because I didn't know it could happen. All my life I had been told that there was no tangible eveidence of God on this side of the grave. The existance of God was taken on faith, and that was that. So, being physically affected by God was not only unexpected, it was a red flag.

But a few hours of prayer and counsel later, I realized that the Holy Spirit was a real person, Jesus was the reason He had anything to with me, and God the Father was in love with me enough to let me feel a bit of His Presence through him. The God who had let me know He was real the night before was not a nebulous mush of philosophical theories with no real identity, no agenda, and no effect, but a Person, the Person written about in the Bible, who sent His Son to become known as Jesus and die for my sins.

It would take forever to recount all the things the Holy Spirit has done with me and through me since then, and this has gone on way too long already. But I thank God for the Holy Spirit, and all He has done in my life.

[Linda]

That really blessed my soul! Thanks.

[cndlou]

I was also very blessed by this... I am assuming it will be okay for me to print and share it with someone else???

[Mike Vande]

If it can bless anyone, please give it to them.