CHAPTER 5. TESTIMONIAL STORIES

In today's blog, I will post the first of 6 stories that have to do with my Christian walk.  I include these 6 stories whenever I am sharing my Christian life experiences to fellow believers and to non-believers.  Often, eyes grow wide or body language tells me that the audience does not believe what I have just related to them.  But, I assure you that these events happened in my life and are reported here just as I have remembered them.  The first story is the first time the Holy Spirit interacted with me in a direct, unambiguous way.  This audible contact with the Holy Spirit blew my mind then, and it still does now when I think of it.  I have called this story Holy Spirit For the First Time.

I have many faith-based stories of events that have occurred in my life, and I will provide some of them below.  However, I have already included other testimonial stories in Chapter 4.  Miracles because I felt that they were so miraculous that they belonged in the miracles chapter.  In any event, I still feel that the following stories are miracles in their own right.  Hopefully, you will agree with me.

HOLY SPIRIT FOR THE FIRST TIME (2002).  I started the renewal of my Christian faith in 2001, right after we moved to Hilton Head in February 2000.  We joined St. Luke’s Church, and we began to study the Bible and to join church small groups to study Christian-related topics.  In one of my first small group study lessons, we were discussing the temptation of Jesus Christ by Satan (see Matthew 4).  I was familiar with this story since my childhood years.  I had always wondered why this particular story was so important and why it was so widely discussed.  I understood that Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time.  Therefore, being fully human, he was subjected to the same temptations as we all are.  Yet, he thoroughly rejected the temptations that Satan threw at him.  I thought, Jesus was also fully God, so what is the big deal here?  Defeating Satan would be a piece of cake to Jesus.  So, at this time, I missed the lessons learned from this story in the Bible; that Jesus is the perfect role model for us to follow in dealing with the many temptations of life and to use Scripture to defeat Satan, as Jesus did.  I did not have these lessons learned in my data bank at the time.
One night, I was lying in bed thinking about the temptation story.  I had my eyes closed when I heard a clear voice in my head say “What does this story mean to you?”  I opened my eyes and looked to the side of my bed fully expecting to see someone standing there.  That’s how clear the voice was.  There was no one there, of course.  I was shook up, but I realized that the Holy Spirit had just asked me a question.  I put my head back down on my pillow and pondered His question.  I answered, “To become more like Jesus?”  He said, “That’s true, but think deeper”.  After a short time, a vision appeared in my head.  The vision was a 45-degree line from the lower left going up to the upper right.  At the top right was Jesus, all that is good.  At the bottom left was Satan, all that is evil.  Near Satan were evil people that would kill their own grandmother if they thought it would benefit them.  As you went up the slope toward Jesus, the more good you became.  It then became clear to me what the Holy Spirit was trying to teach me.  I told Him that although I could never reach the top of this line where Jesus is, I should try to become more like Him each and every day.  He answered me, “You have it” and was gone.
This story almost seems like a fairy tale.  But it did happen to me.  This was the first time that I had a direct interaction with the Holy Spirit, but what He taught me that night has had meaning for me ever since.  My goal in life is to become more like Jesus Christ every day.  Another huge benefit of this experience with the Holy Spirit (and more were to follow) is that whenever little doubts of my Christian faith creep into my mind (and they do to all of us), I just remember what He taught me that night, and the doubts just go away.
An important sidebar to this story is that for 37 years I functioned in the scientific community.  In this world, you cannot say “Trust me”.  To succeed, you have to prove everything you say.  At this new time in my life, I had to think differently and trust what the Bible was telling me.  The Holy Spirit, in His infinite wisdom, knew that I would relate to a continuum line stretching from Satan to Jesus.  He taught me an important lesson that night in a way that I would understand.