What is that? I thought to myself.
The sermon started off like a thousand sermons before it. There was a warm welcome to the congregation from Pastor Boomer and off he went preaching the gospel. I don’t recall much of what he said, but as he preached I noticed what looked like a transparent, brightly glowing halo around his head. I thought my eyes were just blurry. I rubbed my eyes and took a second look—now his head and upper shoulders were completely glowing. What was I seeing? What was happening? I looked around the room to see if anyone else was seeing what I was seeing, and from their sleepy faces and checked-out stares I could tell I was the only one. Maybe I was hallucinating? I moved from the middle of the pew to the end, thinking maybe it was the way the light was hitting him, and when I did that the light intensified and grew larger, finally engulfing his upper body completely.
Pastor Boomer stepped down of the stage, and his every movement was traced with a bright white light, streaming from his arms as he gestured when he spoke. Now it was undeniable—I was, in fact, seeing something quite bizarre. He had turned into what seemed to be a walking lightbulb, and it was freaking me out.
As I was watching this human glow stick preach, the first thought I had was that I would never ever be able to tell anyone about this. But the first thing I did was go to Heath, my older brother.
Hesitating with my words, I said, “Heath, today at church I saw…”
Interrupting my sentence, Heath said, “…the white glow? Did you see Pastor Boomer glowing?” he asked, and then quickly explained that he had been seeing it for years.
I was stunned and relieved that Heath could confirm that I wasn’t having a stroke or, worse, simply losing my mind. But what were we seeing?
The next day I saw Pastor Boomer, and like an unfiltered toddler, I blurted out everything I saw as rapidly as I could. “Yesterday at church I saw your head glowing, and then your arms, and your shoulders too. And there were long streams of white light that came off your body as you spoke and moved. What is that?”
Pastor Boomer dropped his head and a tear rolled down his face. He looked back up at me, and in a kind of soft but short way he said, “That was Holy Spirit.” I felt my entire body freeze up. He didn’t know that I was on a personal mission from God to seek Holy Spirit—which at that time only consisted of reading every scripture that had the name Holy Spirit and quizzing everyone I ran into about who Holy Spirit was. Here I was, staring at a visibly touched pastor who was saying that I had just seen Holy Spirit. I was speechless, until I wasn’t, and then I urged him to explain. He didn’t explain though. Like a giant carrot dangling in front of my face—no, a piece of cake—I wanted more. He thanked me for my encouragement, though I didn’t know I was encouraging him, and he changed the subject quickly.
It was strange—after that experience of seeing Holy Spirit empower Pastor Boomer as he preached the gospel, when I’d tell any leadership in the church about it, they’d all quickly change the subject. And in the most loving way possible they would tell me to stop seeking “that” out. Literally, I heard “stop seeking that out” almost a dozen times. That was frustrating. I wasn’t seeking anything out, and it wasn’t stopping either. After that day in that little Georgia church, I never saw the same way again. My eyes and ears were opened, my senses fully awakened. It was if a realm I always claimed to believe in—but if I’m being honest, I didn’t believe in—was overlaid on top of my world! It was so overwhelming that I actually tried to be delivered from it by having someone pray it away. It was so shocking to my perceived reality that I begged God to make it stop and for me to go back to normal. What I didn’t know at the time was this was normal Christianity. I was awake! I had been baptized by fire and all the scales on my eyes had been consumed by God’s presence.
I never had anyone pray over me to be filled with Holy Spirit. I never asked for any gifts. All I did was seek after understanding, as God commanded, in the only way I knew how. It was that scan of the Scriptures, looking for every place with the name Holy Spirit, that revealed what I had devoted my entire life to, what I called my faith, was shallow and in vain. It is impossible to do a study on Holy Spirit, let alone study Jesus’ life, and not question the so-called Christian lifestyle many of us are faithful to. I was challenged when I read about Peter’s shadow healing sick people (see Acts 5:15-16), and I was uncomfortable when I read about angels unlocking prison doors (see Acts 5:19). I didn’t feel too great when I read about the Day of Pentecost and Holy Spirit igniting the tongues of men (see Acts 2). The standard for what Jesus demonstrated as normal Christianity wasn’t my normal, yet no one seemed to have a problem with that. And it’s certainly likely that they didn’t believe in it, that they embraced the doctrine of cessationism as I had. It was a convenient belief for those who embraced lack and lived from a forgotten identity. But here I was seeing angels and odd beings that looked like shadows and words written above people’s heads with grotesque wounds appearing over people’s bodies. I was hearing private prayers that people had been crying out to God. Angels were literally waking me up by bouncing the end of my bed so my feet would fall from the bed, alerting me that it was time to get up. I was smack dab in the middle of what felt like an alternate universe, and everyone around me was walking oblivious. I couldn’t reconcile the doctrine that I had always clung to so tightly with what was happening, so I was left with the choice to abandon it, trusting Holy Spirit would lead me to the understanding I needed.
I had only confessed to my leadership about the glowing pastor from Georgia, and they told me to stop seeking that out. What would happen if I told them that I knew they were struggling with suicidal thoughts or that they were battling insecurities about their callings? Maybe they would’ve called me a witch or even worse a false prophet. But none of those worries plagued me in the beginning, because I felt alive and hopeful like I had never experienced before. That’s a side effect of spending time with Jesus. With open eyes, I was beginning to see just how incredibly good God was, and though I didn’t even know what the word prophetic meant back then I knew that God had opened my eyes, not just so I could see the unseen but so that I could co-labor with Him in doing something about it. Hope was abounding like never before.
I’ve come to understand, now that I embrace what is described as a naturally supernatural lifestyle, that the most supernatural thing that can ever happen to anyone is not seeing angels or seeing the sick recover—that just comes when you rest in your identity that is found in Christ. But the most supernatural thing has been the moments that God has allowed me to witness people hearing Holy Spirit’s whisper that they are loved by God, leading them to call upon the name of Jesus as their King and find rest in who God says they are. I often run into religious folk who gently rebuke my belief that all people are prophetic and we can all hear God’s voice, but all I need to remind them of is the time they called upon Jesus as their Savior. I ask them if they chose God first or if it was God who chose them first, and then they recognize that they have experienced the supernatural voice of God calling out to them at least one recognizable time in their life. And then I kindly suggest to them that if God spoke to them once, it may not be inconceivable that He might do it again, maybe even a lot.
There are a few reasons why I run into these rebukes. Obviously some are coming from a doctrinal standpoint, which I understand because that was my life, but a lot of the time, I believe, people do not believe they can hear God’s voice because not only do they wrestle with identity issues and shame, but they also generally don’t understand how they function as a triune being—a body with a spirit and soul—and they don’t know how Holy Spirit communes with us. People generally reject things they do not understand, but in this case they are rejecting the very thing they were designed to do—walk with a God who is Spirit in the natural.