I was standing there praying over the members of my new family when my favorite Ginger brother approached me. Opening my eyes, I listened as he began to speak to me in a very intentional voice:
“I believe God has given me a phrase to give to you: declare freedom. I’m not sure if that means anything to you now, but that’s what it is.”
Sam and I prayed together before he moved on to speak with other people. I was left standing there feeling a bit confused, a bit intrigued, and, admittedly, a bit doubtful. The whole idea of listening to the Spirit is still foreign to me. I had no idea what that phrase meant or even if it applied to me directly. But I made a conscious decision to trust in the things I did know: God can work in whatever way He wants, He speaks to those who are lovingly seeking Him, and Sam is definitely one of those people.
Not even 5 minutes later, a member of the AIM staff whom I had never met walked up to me and asked to pray over me. After learning my name, she began slowly,
“Lord, I want to lift Lindsay up to You. I pray You… You declare freedom over her and in her life…”
As she spoke the phrase still etched in my mind, I felt the tears begin to fall. Without knowing a thing about me, this young woman began to pray things over me far too personal to be called coincidence. She spoke about my struggle with perfectionism, my fear of being too much and my attempts to hide the person I am to fit some standard. She prayed and listened, spoke with me and prayed some more. We both had tears on our faces by the end, but they had turned to tears of joy. I felt a peace in my heart I hadn’t even realized I’d been missing.
When we finally hugged and she prepared to go, I asked my new friend her name.
“My name is Angel,” she replied.
This is just the first of many stories I will share over the next year about God’s work in and around me. I didn’t grow up in a culture where we spoke much about the Holy Spirit’s power, but I can no longer deny His presence nor put Him in a box. I had believed the Spirit’s only real roles in our lives were to lead us in discernment or to convict us of sin. I was left in a state of doubt and wanting. I questioned experiences that led to an emotional response, doubting their validity. I distrusted my own emotions, wanting clear facts and identifiable lessons to be learned. These lies had affected my intimacy with God.
I have a desperate desire to feel God’s presence in my life. Our emotions are a gift from God, created in us as yet another way to worship Him. Pure intimacy with God demands we learn to respond to His love with our entire beings. We often get caught up in questioning the experiences of others, of closing ourselves off to the experiences God wants us to have in our own lives. I believe God calls us to use the logic and rational thinking He has given us to test and discern. But we’ve allowed our love of the neat-and-tidy to put God in a culturally-constructed box leaving no room for His Spirit to work in our lives.
I have a new fire inside of me I can’t explain. The freedom and joy I feel can’t be rationalized or clearly labeled. I had experiences with God that can only be attributed to the presence of the Holy Spirit. I laughed. I cried. I shouted to the Heavens and sang the words in my heart rather than the words on some screen. The overwhelming love I felt left goosebumps on my arms and I’m sure I had a huge goofy smile plastered on my face for most of the week.
I asked my God to show Himself to me, to astound me with His love, and to fill me with the Spirit so I may live in a place of overflow as I set out to serve His people. I asked Him to help me set aside my doubts, my skepticism, and my fear of the vulnerability of emotion in order to fully experience His love through the Spirit living inside of me. And, if you believe nothing else about what I’ve said in this post, believe one thing: my God has never failed to deliver on His promises.
