Listening Within

The Holy Spirit and his role is never something discussed in school scripture or Sunday school, apart from a brief mention as the mysterious "third member of the trinity" - the gas, to God and Jesus' ice and water (if I may use the analogy used to explain the trinity to me at school). And what I heard from the media and discussion about Christianity confused me. What the heck was "being slain in the Spirit" (a question I still have today...) or what does it mean to be "led by the Spirit"?

So the Spirit remained this shadowy background presence that my little Anglican-brought up self wasn't sure she wanted anything to do with.

After I started going to bible study, I started hearing different things, about how the Spirit lives in all Christians. And there were these fruit of the Spirit, which everyone wants to have and we need to rely on the Spirit... "But what does it all mean? How does it work?" I wanted to ask.

It's been a long time coming, but I finally feel I am beginning to understand a bit about the Holy Spirit, and how He works. He is God dwelling in us, and because of that, He changes the way we perceive the world. I think in a sense the Holy Spirit is God-coloured glasses, that every Christian puts on - often without knowing it - when they sign up to follow Christ. And while we are still looking around for 'evidence' of the Spirit in our lives - healings, tongues, miracles - we miss the real evidence of the work of the Spirit. Those moments where the Spirit has allowed us to see glimpses of God and feel joy, to reach out in love where we would have held back, the recognition of sin and turning from it - these are the real evidence of the Spirit.

But what does that mean? To me, it means I need to listen more inside. I don't think the Spirit speaks in an audible voice, even inside, or in any words - or at least, He certainly hasn't for me. But I know that it is He who brings the changes are reshaping my mind and my heart, and when I am quiet and listening, He shows me these things, and what else needs to be done.

I know there is much more I have to learn about the Spirit and his role, and that there definitely are some flaws in my understanding at present, but I feel I've come a long way from the Holy Ghost lurking somewhere in the murky depths, that I knew of in the past. And before I go, I must acknowledge a book that has helped me to articulate a lot of what I have begun to experience - Reaching for the Invisible God, by Philip Yancey (in particular the chapters "The Go-Between" and "Out of Control").

An hour of my life...

26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in
barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable
than they? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

Jesus - Matthew 6:26-27

I will readily admit that I stress a lot. My natural instinct in a difficult situation is always to worry - to imagine what could go wrong and think the worst. I don't enjoy this experience, and neither do others around me. I hate it when I can't concentrate on what people are saying because I have all my worries running through my mind. I resent the fact that it makes me look unhappy and perpetually in a rush. But most of all, I dislike the fact that it just consumes so much of my time and my energy. It takes away from my whole life - sleeping, eating, studying, relaxing... everything is affected. It certainly doesn't add anything to my life - instead, it damages my normal existence.

In the lead up to an event that has been causing me a fair bit of stress and worry, I sat down with my mentor, and she tried to get me to talk through my worrying and what its like. I came up with this metaphor - not perfect, but gives you the basic idea of what I feel worrying is like.

For me, worry is like this enveloping cloud. Each little detail is another wisp of white, and as they gather all around you, they blind you to the bigger picture until you can't see what you're doing or where you're going. It's not until you step outside the cloud, that you see what which way the wind is blowing and whether your cloud is a storm cloud or a fluff ball. We need to step outside our worries and look at the bigger picture of what God is doing, and what his purpose is in this stressful time.

Facing Fears

Yesterday at church, our speaker really confronted us with looking at our lives to examine what areas we lack faith in. He suggested areas like money or studies - that working copious hours at work or spending every moment studying is a lack of faith in God's provision. But what came to my mind is that often I fail to have faith in God's ability to overcome my fears.

I am naturally a fearful person. Ironically, last night, I watched a movie - Nim's Island - where one of the main characters is afraid of everything - germs, spiders, other people, her front door... And while I was able to laugh at Alex's silliness, and at her misadventures as she is forced to face her fears in order to help Nim, I saw a little bit of myself in her. I am afraid of so much. Now, I know the right kind of fear - a healthy respect for God's power - is essential, but the wrong kind of fear - my kind of fear - is a failure to trust God and his goodness, and that is sin.

Funnily enough, today, I got thrown in the deep end. My mother proposed we take a trip out of the city, to a rainforest about 2 hours away. Sounds lovely, yes? But then comes the tricky part. I am learning to drive at the moment, and honestly, it scares me to death. My mother wanted me to drive there, which meant winding country roads and two motorways. Then came the clincher. Since I was a little girl, I have had a phobia of heights. Winding staircases and those steel grid gangways send me into a sobbing mess. And suddenly we get to the rainforest, where Mum wants to go on a new rainforest canopy walk - an elevated walkway 20 metres off the forest floor, culminating in a 45m high tower - with an open to the air winding staircase to the top.

And I did them both.

I think God must be into practical lessons.

Protected

Both these occurrences were a few weeks ago, but I remembered both of them this morning, and I finally saw them in a different light.

I was sitting in a lecture a while ago, and most of my friends were talking, while I was off day-dreaming (as normal). When they all burst out laughing, I returned to Earth and asked in my normal nosy fashion what they were talking about. One of the guys was about to relate the joke to me, when my friend stopped him. I looked at him in surprise, and he could obviously see that in my face. So he said very carefully, "You don't want to hear this joke", and I could tell from the expression on his face exactly what kind of joke it had been. This guy is a good friend, one of the few other Christians in my course, and I trust his judgement (most of the time) but at the time I felt quite... well, babied - as if I wasn't responsible enough to make my own call on what I should hear. And also a bit of "Well who are you to have a say in what I listen to? You're not my boyfriend or my family."

Then a couple of weeks later, a similar thing happened. I was walking through one of the buildings on campus, when the guys I was walking with (who is normally VERY talkative) stopped talking, and said, "Kit, I just want you to look at me, and not at the walls". Yet again, my face must have said it all, because he explained straight away. "There's some new 'art' up that you probably don't want to see." Again, at the time I obeyed, but more out of humouring my friend than out of believing he was right. In fact, I think my thought at the time was "Oh, it's probably just pictures of naked people. That wouldn't bother me; I've studied anatomy."

This morning brought a whole new light on these incidents. Instead of feeling patronised or resentful, I started to feel thankful for what these guys had done for me. In a world that seems to do everything it can to strip young people of their purity, these guys had put themselves out to protect MY purity. Not their own, but mine. They cared enough about a sister (who didn't care herself) to step in and hold her back from harm. And while I know these certainly weren't horrific dangers to my purity, what means something to me is that they cared. Think about, sisters - true brothers will want to protect your purity, even as the world tries to take it away.