Easter Prayer Experience

At church this Easter, my pastor spoke about experiencing God. To this end, he had us do a prayer exercise.  We were to be silent for one minute and pray, “are you there?” Just then my wife, who was sitting next to me, put her head on my shoulder. In that instant, something said to me, “I am the bond between you and her, just as I am the bond between the Father and the Son.” I realized that I was being addressed by the Holy Spirit.  If you believe this is outlandish, there is a long tradition (4000 years long) of God speaking plainly to humans in the bible.  We believe he is a living personality and he gives us nudges and words that we evaluate to see if it is God in light of a relationship with him (and knowing his personality from the pages of scripture.)  This is an especially strong tradition in the Evangelical spirit-filled church of which I am a member.

After prayer, we did the doxology and I got up and went to the restroom. There, standing at the urinal, I heard the church sing “amen, amen, amen” together at the end of the doxology.  I pictured the congregation with the Holy Spirit binding them together.  He was the love between them that makes the church the body of Christ. Isn't it just like God to speak to you while you are standing at a urinal?  That’s the God I know and love.  And our “conversation” that day was a window into the personality of the Holy Spirit, who is one with the Father and Son, and is often describe as the love between them. But I realized that he too carries the personality of God, and he is the bond that makes the church work. He directs the body through the bonds between its members. It is a great mystery and one I do not pretend to understand, but maybe today I got a little closer to that understanding.