I was thinking about this, so I thought to share them with you and they are by far, my top 3 experiences with something divine that I don’t think can be explained away. They aren’t my only ones but the more intense ones that stand out to me. I’m sure someone can try to explain these away, but they would have to be in my shoes to convince me and no one has been, so I doubt any explaination would do justice to it. Did I just sound as crazy as Gene Wilder right then?
Encounter #1: This was my earliest and I’ve mentioned it on this website before. It was my first “experience” and when I wasn’t really looking for it because I wasn’t a God follower back then. I went through the motions as any kid did because you parents made you go to church. I often got “whoopens” in the car for protests and often whined about going. I didn’t understand the worship of all this old, dead stuff and ghosts. It was time for my 1st Communion in the Catholic Church coming up so you had to go through confirmation and part of that was our class was to see the priest and learn about the sacraments at the alter. I remember feeling pretty impressed with him and feeling like I learned something new. However, understand when I say though it was more delightful than I expected, it wasn’t like I felt a lightning bolt came down from heaven, or that Jesus stepped in. I just noticed a sense of having learned something and that he was a good priest and being surprised that it wasn’t bad. A couple of us commented on it on our way out.
When I exited the church, and started walking home, I noticed this delight still with me but that also I no longer felt my feet. It was like was like floating. I literally looked down to see if my feet were hitting the pavement. The joy grew and grew and I sensed this presence and the night sky came alive to me in a way it never had before. I wondered if I might float away. It was like I was walking on air and for the first time in my life I had a taste that God, whoever this was, was good.
Encounter 2: In highschool, it was a particularly rough time. Bullied every day by peers, teachers, an undiagnosed blood sugar problem and benign tremor disorder, closeted gay and feeling outted every day by being called “fag”. My self worth was broken. I would at times just ask my parents to tell me that they loved me, crying. I could barely take it. We lived in an apartment complex, and I often took many walks the years I lived year besides spying on the men by the poolside LOL. This particular year until the time we moved out something began to happen. When you turned out of our apartment there was a stretch of road that led to the busy street. On one side of this road was our apartments and on the otherside just tall weeds. It was on this stretch road I would be literally struck with a presence from that time forward that sent my spirit soaring. My body just electrified and my skin filled with goose pimples. So much so that it got to where a few times, I ran to make a leap in the air feeling I might fly. I only did this once or twice, embarrassed at how silly it was. My spirit felt it was ready to fly and some part of me seemed dismayed it couldn’t carry on with this presence to do just that. I received a prophecy about my future that did end up coming true in very later years on one of these encounters. I believe this was God’s way of encouraging me during that time. I wish it healed me of my wounds, gave me all this self confidence, or made me a warrior of the faith. But it didn’t. I was so devastasted that it just was what it was and when I turned back into the apartments, it was gone and I was back to being me. I didn’t fully understand it at the time but just God letting me know they were there. For me, I wanted out of the situation because every day it was still back to the same thing. Yet even so, from this time on, till we move, I could walk on this road and the same thing would happen time and time again. If I had been older and wiser, I would have understood it better but in the time it was, it was a comfort for what it is and special that I now look back at it and at least know I wasn’t totally abandoned.
Encounter 3: I took a ministry counseling internship once and I wouldn’t do it today. They really thought it held all the answers about God that the Church did not and was fundamentalist even more so while saying they weren’t lost like the Church was. It was a dangerous practice they were doing in practicing mental health counseling with scripture only. On the flip side, it was an answer to prayer because tucked in the middle of their radical craziness was some Christian mysticism at the core of their beliefs that Churches today have abandoned and is now the core of who I am. It was this focus they had at the center that rescued me many times over for years to come, even in helping me turning away from them in the end!
Nevertheless, as I took this 6 month counseling internship with them, every morning there would be some question on my heart I had. And almost every morning (I would say 90% of the time), I would pick up my devotional and it would address that question, often right in the very title. One of my worst mental problems with myself and God was healed during this internship. God answered it because I was off work and just spending 6 months listening. So though I would not ever be with this ministry today, God used this ministry even with it’s misguided, dangerous elements. It does make you wonder about what we want to censor and cancel. Someone would have loved to close that ministry down, maybe myself included, and yet, they came into my small town and it saved me a number of times from such dark places with this Christian mysticism that is at the heart of my spirituality today that I love and treasure.
God can and does use everything. What are your great encounters with the divine, spirit, the universe–however you perceive that to be?
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