Different

I feel like my relationship with God is different from that of other people I know.

At first I assumed that everyone’s relationship with God was just like mine. I was totally blown away by it and wanted to talk about that with everybody who was willing. I couldn’t believe that born-again Christians who had a personal relationship with God were having these totally mind-blowing experiences all the time and nobody was talking about it.

Then I started to realize that while others might be having mind-blowing experiences with God all the time, they weren’t necessarily the same as my mind-blowing experiences. I didn’t know what to make of that.

Sometimes it scares me. Sometimes it makes me not want to talk about my experiences with God at all for fear of being misunderstood and mislabeled (Know-it-all, bragging, lying, holier than thou, crazy, etc.). Sometimes I worry that maybe I really have gone off the deep end. (The non-believing members of my own family are sure this is so.)

I feel like God has become my best friend. He is always – always – with me every minute of every day, always giving me gentle … and sometimes not so gentle … nudges to keep me on track, instruction on my failings when I’m clueless, help when I need it, etc.

Holy Spirit can sometimes literally take over from conscious worldly-me and put words in my mouth from the person I haven’t yet become. I’m sure that doesn’t make any sense, but for example – I sometimes find myself learning something new from the very words that I am speaking. I know how weird that sounds, but it’s happened more than once that I heard myself mentioning Bible passages and verses relevant to the situation or articulating a Biblical explanation of something that I didn’t even know about until I listened to the words coming out of my own mouth. Some of those experiences I’ve written about on this Blog. I feel like the Holy Spirit is always there with me, 100% of the time, waiting in the wings ready to help me out when my own knowledge or understanding of something important is deficient.

And words have always been a major theme right from the beginning of my walk with Jesus. After I had my born-again spiritual moment (and I could tell you the exact time & place that happened if you wanted to know) I remember complaining over and over again to the somewhat perplexed friend who’d led me to Jesus, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any vocabulary words to describe what just happened!”

Almost immediately (within 2-3 weeks) I felt compelled to start this Blog. I remember asking my friend/mentor, “Should I even be doing this?” and my friend just said, “Remember to let God lead,” which was the best piece of spiritual advice I’ve ever received from another human.

I also feel – to this day – almost incapable of learning enough about God. I literally spend hours every morning reading and studying His word, praying, and sometimes just being with Him silently. And sometimes I am so eager to spend that sacred time with Him that I literally get up in the middle of the night just so that I don’t have to wait another 2 hours before I greet Him to start the day.

I have vivid dreams about Jesus all the time – and many of those dreams do in fact actually happen, or tell me something important. Like the dream I once had of meeting Jesus and He was crying. I asked what was wrong, and He said, “I had such great plans for you but you were always too busy,” Or like, I’ll have a dream about Jesus telling me that I need to work more on “X” in my life, and then suddenly almost everything I read or study or hear in church or read in my Bible study group seems to be pointing to ways of dealing with “X”

Okay, so why am I saying all this?

First, because it’s true. One thing I always wanted for this Blog is that it be a comfortable place for Truth.

Second (taking a deep breath…) because, well, I’ve kind of been wondering and waiting to find out how God wants to use me. I definitely feel driven to hurry up and prepare myself for His mission but … I don’t know what my role in that is yet.

I think I’m starting to get a glimpse….

But maybe more importantly, I think I’m starting to see a picture in which all the things about myself that I always thought were weird, broken, defective, not at all normal, are actually Gifts of the Holy Spirit