A Significant Experience (and Gift?)

Nov 22 2021 at Living Grace Dianella

Mon (the senior minister) was preaching on God breaking into the ‘same-same’ of life.

I felt like Luke 1:14-17 (part of John the Baptist’s birth narrative) was for me.

“And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.” (This is the ESV, I don’t recall what translation Mon was using).

I was thinking ‘spirit and power of David Boan’ (my first significant Bible teacher), but it didn’t quite sit. Then this shifted (and I think the Spirit might’ve been the one who shifted it) to ‘Spirit and power of Jesus Christ’ (to which I was like, ‘whoa!’, but then thought that this actually made a lot of sense in light of scripture).

About halfway through Mon’s sermon I started feeling a sensation in my chest that I associate with the Holy Spirit. It persisted, and also built up during the rest of the service to the point where I was feeling it in my wrists (or maybe my forearms). This is something new, I haven’t had this sensation in my wrists before.

After the service, but still in the midst of this experience, I asked Michael to pray for me. We talked about my experience for a little bit, and as he was praying for me there was a moment or two where the sensation went down into my hands.

When I got up and started moving around, the sensation stayed in my wrists - it stayed for the better part of morning tea after church.

I’ve heard about sensations in the hand being about healing, but I’m trying not to jump to conclusions. Will see how this plays out. That said, I’m feeling excited about the affirmation of my call, and the sense that God may be doing something new in my life.

Jan 5 2022

Heather (who was on the staff team at Dianella) mentioned (very apologetically) that on the day of my experience she felt that God wanted her to pray for me, but she managed to convince herself that I wouldn’t want her to pray for me. She said that she felt it had something to do with a healing gift. I also asked if she had heard about what happened for me on that day and she said she hadn’t.

In some ways I found this encouraging as it provided an external reminder of my experience. I think this was part of what inspired me to collate all my spiritual experiences digitally. I did this privately at first, but for some reason I wrote/edited them as though others would be reading. This has made it pretty easy to put them up online 🙂

What Heather said also provided further support to the idea that the experience was related to a gift of healing.

Looking Back

Looking back, I think that from an experiential point of view this was probably the most significant spiritual experience I’ve had since my early pair of spiritual experiences. (a bit more happened for me on this occasion than just what I described here.)

As for the gift of healing, I’ve made a few attempts at trying it out or exploring it, but nothing’s come of this so far…

I have come across one alternative understanding of this gift, but I’ll save that for another day. In the meantime I have these journal entries to remind me of what happened, and I suppose putting it out in public creates some sort of accountability too 🙂