Incidentally, I've just decided that this mini-series on the lifeshapes conference will have movie subtitles (this mini-series will only run to about 4 posts, panic ye not). Let's see if i can make it work. For the uninitiated, thus far we have Dr Strangelove and Sister Act 2.
The Holy Spirit used to make me do weird stuff like shake, cry and fall over. Or, i think it did. Or, i don't think i was kidding myself too much, plus i was a teenager so i don't really know what was genuine and what was me wanting to fit in. And it was the 90's. I also used to really, really know loads about Christianity too, now i know hardly anything!
This week at St.Tom's was a week of unavoidable, unadulterated and near unbearable Conservative Charismatisism. Please understand, i don't say 'unbearable' to be deliberately rude. Rather, it comes from a personal place where i, as an adult with a deep commitment to Christ, reflecting on my former charismatic experiences, feel, in some ways, spiritually abused.
One of the things which was good/extremely difficult about this week was getting to see and partake in stuff which was formative to my spirituality, yet which is a very different place to where i'm at now, and revisiting it in light of that. One key thing i've come away with is a revised view on prophecy.
There came a point of choosing seminars and, in the spirit of the event, i thought 'which of these is going to pee me off the most?'. I found myself in the prophecy seminar.
"He's gonna talk about waiting on the Lord, giving out words to people, discerning the difference between your thoughts and God's and all the different ways God can speak - pictures, words, objects, Bible verses popping into your head etc" i thought. Guess what? I was right and i was satisfactorally pee'd off! Somewhere in the middle of this though, i realised that, along with the shedding of my conservative charismatic self, i'd shed the idea that God might speak to me with a particular message for a particular person at a particular time. Shame. I wouldn't talk about it in the way the speaker did, nor would i exercise it that way, but i did think perhaps it was something i'd been missing.
What's ironic (there's always got to be at least one ironic thing) is that there were two situations last week where i was given 'a word from God' by someone. Both were situations where the messenger was under a lot of pressure to come up with something, and both were situations where what was said meant nothing at all to me. Yet what God really seemed to be saying through all this was 'This kind of prophecy is a valuable thing and it is real sometimes, so listen for it'.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment