A Pair of Spiritual Experiences: Part 1

When I was 21, and not long after I had graduated from WAAPA, I had two significant and formative experiences of the Holy Spirit.

The first was on a Saturday evening. I had been talking to my older brother James as we were driving somewhere. By the time we got home I felt that, in our conversation, a number of ideas had come together for me in a way that felt quite significant. I wanted to capture them somehow, but I didn’t know how. I’d also been intending to watch a movie that night, and was torn about what to do. I felt that, if I watched the movie, I’d lose these revelations altogether, but I also felt that I couldn’t capture them even if I tried. So after some internal wrestling, I decided I’d try to trust God with the ideas. I wouldn’t watch the movie, but I wouldn’t try to capture these ideas either. I think I prayed something to this effect, and then went to my room and lay on my bed. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen when I lay on my bed, but as I lay there I heard the Holy Spirit pray for me:

“Please help me, Please teach me, Please protect me.”

I was quite shocked. Despite having previously heard the Spirit say ‘Time to leave’, I felt that nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I went to tell James what happened, and as I said something to the effect of ‘you just changed my life’, I broke down in tears and entered into some sort of spiritual experience.

The content of this first experience has blurred together with the second one for me now, but I do remember that during this first experience I had a sense of something that still feels a bit hard to describe. It was like I could sense the perfection of God as a kind of light, and at that point I could understand how it could take all of eternity for us to become more and more like God.

I also had this awareness that I was broken and dependent, but somehow this was a good and freeing thing. Being broken and dependent didn’t sound so ‘good and freeing’ to me when I told people about this during the following week, but I could still remember the sense that it was good and freeing when I told them.

While I wanted to stay in this experience, eventually I thought it better to pull myself out of it so I could explain to James what was happening, (at this stage I think I was lying on the floor or something). I told my parents what happened that night and also gave Jules a call. I remember it taking me a long time to get to sleep because there was so much to process…