Footsteps in the Sand
April 27, 2008 by adifferentvoice
Take a glass of water, and spill into it a spoonful of sugar. The sugar will dissolve in the water to make a syrup so that its crystals may no longer be seen and it and the water are one. But heat the water until it boils, and evaporate it away, and the sugar will be left as before.
Again, take a glass of water. Cool it until it freezes. The water changes from a liquid to a solid, but only until it thaws. Then it becomes water again.
Or take a candle and light it, holding it above the glass of water. The wax around the wick melts and drips down the candle into the water, and becomes a solid again.
Take some clay, turn into into a pot and fire it. The transformation of the clay is fixed. It will never, once it has been fired, become clay again.
Or take wheat ground into flour and bake it into a loaf of bread. The loaf includes the flour, and the flour has become part of the bread. Never again will it be flour.
Or the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly.
So it is with transformations. Some are reversible, like the sugar solution, the ice, and the wax. Others, once they have taken place can never be undone.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
2 Corinthians Ch 5 v 17
That was the theme of this morning’s service in the church opposite my home. It used to be my spiritual home for many years until the Toronto Blessing drove me reluctantly away and we retreated to a less challenging place. It still feels like home, especially when Freda, a Church elder who never gets any older though she must be over eighty, hugged me, and called me by my name, and moved a strand of hair off my face. I felt like the lamb that the shepherd stayed up all night for, and I wanted to cry.
“until the Toronto Blessing drove me reluctantly away and we retreated to a less challenging place.”
“A Different Voice”: Please explain what the “Toronto Blessing” is for you.
Thanks,
Muffin Lady
Muffin Lady,
I’m not sure whether you are enquiring what the Toronto Blessing is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_blessing) or whether you are asking how we experienced it.
In answer to the second part, I didn’t experience much because I was supervising very small children in the creche that day and so was out of the church for most of the service. However, it was supposedly Harvest Festival, and we had persuaded a house guest of ours, a Finnish lawyer, to come and see our traditional harvest festival service …
We didn’t realise that a team of people had been invited to the church from another church, St Andrews, Chorleywood. This team had been “infected” by the Holy Spirit supposedly manifesting itself at an airport church in Toronto (see link above). The team seemed to have the ability to reproduce the same phenomenon at will in any other church they visited. Our church was an evangelical Anglican church which had a tradition of acceptance of the “gifts” of the spirit, and had asked St Andrews to come. What happened was, apparently, near mass hysteria, with people being “slain in the spirit”, falling down to the ground in the aisles, and several people running around the church with their arms flailing above their heads, and lots of people talking in “tongues”. It all began with a period of deep concentration where the whole congregation was asked to stand for several minutes, eyes closed, and arms extended above their heads. Our Finnish friend was, well, appalled. He said that the eyes closed, arms raised bit was a classic tactic taught during Finnish military service as a very good way to disorient the enemy. The Intrepid Explorer had never seen anything like it, and did not want to again …
Things calmed down, and the church decided - responsibly, I think - that it needed to discern whether the Spirit had indeed been present, and that the presence of the Spirit would be proven if there was a growth in the “fruits” of the Spirit alongside any manifestation of gifts such as tongues, phrophesy etc. We continued to hold the vicar in high regard, and - although he was no longer our own vicar - he was the most helpful when I began to struggle with my faith a couple of years later … We now have a new vicar.
Hope that answers your question …
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Different Voice: And to think this has all gone on in the city of my birth. I do recall reading about it. It seems to be a profitable ‘business’ this church.
After years of going to church, I can no longer sit my fanny in the church and repeat the Nicene Creed. I believe that people should be allowed to worship as they choose as long as it is not harmful to them or their fellow ‘man’. However, that statement needs to be qualified for I resent when the newer religious movements take advantage of vulnerable people and I trust that whatever people get out of the Airport Church, it rewards them in more than what is missing out of their pocketbooks. I feel that Christ, if what I read is to be believed, was truly ‘christian’ in his preachings, the likes of which are not always found on the boards of church wardens, etc. nor in their parishioners. And the historical religious wars, the wars now, leave me feeling that if there is a God that he/she must be weeping now to see how mankind has and is treating one another.
Muffin Lady