miracles and anagrams

Another exciting day!

Exciting pure and simple because of the awareness of the Lord being at work and of my being somehow caught up in it all. Some days that's just clear as daylight and I think, what a privilege: wonderful. Literally!

I've been praying this past while very particularly that the Lord would start doing the miraculous among us. Evidently so: markedly and remarkably so, as it were. So that people sit up and take notice. And so that it's not something we read about as happening just way back then, or there in other places: but here and now.

It's good news we're meant to proclaim. Not good history. Things that God is doing today as well as what he once was pleased to do. It's always seemed strange to think that we could even try to proclaim good news if we constantly had to qualify it all by saying, of course he doesn't do that sort of thing these days.

That's kind of like our talking about this great and stunning fireworks display, and then admitting we've actually only got a set of damp squibs ourselves.

So I've been praying hard along these lines in recent days. Sure that this is what the Lord is keen to do: and only waits for us to be really open to it all.

(It's scary, after all: we lose control when God is given that sort of free rein).

Anyway, over these last three days four different people have testified to how the Lord has simply worked a miracle in their (or their friend's) lives! Quite remarkable, and thrilling beyond words.

I realised right away when these folk spoke that this was very much God's answer to that prayer. I think I'd kind of thought (or hoped, more like!) that I would be involved (it makes it more impressive, after all, if I'm the one through whom he works like that!).

But miracles are his to do. And I don't mind how he does it or through whom!

(You can see why I find myself excited!).

On top of that today, though, a large part of my time's been spent in speaking with a couple of folk and talking through their present situation under God.

Both friends. I work at that. I aim to be a friend to folk, instead of just their pastor. I figure that's how it's meant to be. What Jesus was.

Both very different, of course. But both had wanted to talk, to toss around their present situation and what it was the Lord was somehow saying to them through it all.

I act like a kind of filter, I suppose. A sounding board. It sometimes seems, as well, a bit like being as Joseph was, an interpreter of dreams. Except it's not dreams as such!

They feed me all the data and under God I try and help interpret it for them. Make sense of what's going on.

It's humbling and scary and awesome and thrilling and .. well, they're often just times when the Lord is so very much there. And we're both as we talk so very much conscious of that.

God the great Creator bringing order once again from all the hopeless chaos of the many different factors in their lives. God casting light upon their lives in quite the most amazing and remarkable of ways.

It's very much another mighty moving of the Spirit of almighty God. Thrilling to see and to share. For it's simply this - he speaks. It's like they hear his very voice.

Almost like some stunning spiritual anagram. All the different letters (comprised by all the circumstances which they're conscious of), but jumbled in their busy minds and lives. And the role that I have is to take those jumbled 'letters', the many varied factors which are coming into play, and figure out the word that God is speaking to their hearts.

The morning was like that, with a lovely young woman whom I've known for ever so long. The afternoon in many ways a replica of that as well, in working through a second time the issues that 'appraisal' at her place of work is in these days affording to this other friend.

How long I was with them I haven't a clue. Time became irrelevant. God was simply there. At work. Speaking to their hearts. Directing and leading them on.

And it leaves me thinking what a massive privilege it is to follow Jesus Christ! Humbling, thrilling: and I wouldn't ever miss it for the world!