So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered seventy of the elders of the people and placed them all around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders, and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied.
– Numbers 11: 24-25
Have you had this experience?
The experience of the Spirit resting on you?
I have, and I will share something about that.
Something that now strikes me as faintly embarrassing
but is absolutely true nonetheless.
I grew up reading the wrong books.
About God and faith, anyway.
The only Christian books I was exposed to in my youth
were the ones telling me not to have sex before marriage
and that if I wasn’t having daily quiet time,
daily petitioning the Lord for safety,
then whatever befell me was basically my own fault.
Definitely the wrong books.
When, as a middle-aged adult,
I had an experience of the Holy Spirit resting on me,
which felt . . .
exactly like you would think it would feel
to have the Holy Spirit resting on you –
I was absolutely silent about it.
I told no one and I didn’t write about it.
I had never heard of the Christian Mystics
or the Desert Fathers and Mothers,
and I did not know that a person was “allowed”
to write about an experience of God.
I thought it had to be private,
that if I shared it,
if I opened it to public scrutiny, as it were,
it would evaporate like mist in the morning
and I would be left talking about something
that left no visible sign
and therefore no one would believe me
and I would be revealed as having made the whole thing up,
even though I knew I hadn’t.
Thankfully, I was mistaken.
You can talk about your experiences of God,
you should talk about your experiences of God,
and examination of these experiences,
prayerfully and with wisdom,
is vitally important, life-giving,
and is meant to be done in Christian community.
The Bible is full of the stories of the movements of God.
Our lives are, too.
Thanks be to God.
Lindy Thompson 