Pentecost

I found a link to a photograph that was taken of me in July of 2006 for a project and I started thinking about that time. I had been born again for seven months, and everything was so new. It’s been over seven years now and sometimes  I can forget the wide eyed wonder of those days. It was a lovely reminder of the way that God changes us in an instant, the way the hand of God moves through your life in such a powerful way that your life is completely changed.

When we are born again, there is a process that we go through with God. It's different for everyone, because God knows that we are all unique, and He treats us as beautiful, unique beings. He is very personal in His approach, and one thing that happens for all of us is that the Holy Spirit comes to live with us, to help us and guide us and teach us. That Spirit of God is the very breath of life, and the work of the Spirit begins when we are born again and continues forever so that we are always growing and changing and learning and becoming closer to the image of God that He originally created us to be.

There is a fisherman I know who I met before I was born again. During the time when my life completely fell apart, he was such a loving support. I’d stop by to see him where he worked, and he’d always give me some fish to take home because he thought I was looking so forlorn and so thin. No matter how busy he was, he always asked me with concern how I was doing, and he kept saying that he wanted to feed me because I was looking so thin and he was worried about me. At the time I was born again I had been in a relationship with a man who should have been caring for me and who wasn't. Someone who betrayed me and took advantage of my relative youth and loving heart because he was so damaged he didn't know how to love, and so damaged he needed love that he couldn't give. He saw an opportunity for full support and a heart completely open to him, and he took it. Growing up I had both father and brothers, but none of them knew how to love and support, so my relationship with this man was just the same as everything I knew before. I could give everything of myself and never receive anything back and I thought that was all right - that was the way things were. To have a man who wanted nothing from me and who wanted to take care of me from his heart, to have a man treat me with love and respect and caring was something that nourished my soul and my heart even more than the fish itself nourished my body. To have a man care about me for the person that I was, not for what I could do for him, helped me to begin to walk in a new way, the way of strength and hope and life.

Jesus tells two fisherman in Matthew 4:19, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” This happens just at the beginning of His ministry, just after he has been in the wilderness being tempted by the devil, and just after He has gone to live “in Capernaum, by the sea, in the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying ‘The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles: The people who sat in darkness saw a great light, and upon those who sat in the region of death light has dawned.” (Matthew 4:14) Right after Jesus calls those two fishermen, He calls two more, and then with these new disciples He goes, “all about Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and disease among the people.” (verse 23)

At the time I was born again, I was sitting in darkness, in the region of death. I had gotten to a point in my life that I wanted to die. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wanted something to happen that would end it all. And then a great light dawned, and I was taken out of that darkness into a new day. By the time the photograph was taken that I found last night, I was healed in a way that could only be supernatural. I have no makeup on, I’m wearing something very simple, I’m sitting on the floor in the new apartment I’d moved into with a book in my hand of testimonies of God's goodness by ordinary people like me that was given to me by a Pastor I’d met at the church I’d started to go to. There is such a freshness and peace in that photo, almost like a new and younger version of myself, like I’d gone back into my childhood again and was completely renewed. That is what the experience of being born again was like for me. Over the years of living my life in the way I’d been living it, doing things the only way I knew how to do, reacting to people, reacting to things, dealing with life in the way that seemed the only way to deal with it, making decisions that I thought were the only ones I could make, I’d become older and harder, I’d forgotten what joy was, I’d forgotten how to just be. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I see so much in that photo. All of the years of strain and stress have dropped away, and there is a freshness of the newness of life.

The fish that my friend gives me is the most delicious fish I have ever had. He works hard to fish for that fish, going out all over Long Island Sound in all kinds of weather at all kinds of hours. He cleans it and brings it into the city to sell as fresh as just off the boat. The taste of the sea is still in that fish, the taste of the freshness and newness of life. There is health in that fish, and strength, and there is the love of a fisherman for a friend, a love that gives a sweetness to the taste that is from the hand of God. When we reach out in love to a friend, when we do what we can from our heart, when we take the time to care about someone even as we need to go about our daily lives, when we take a moment to share a laugh, to share a hug, to share some food, we are doing what God asks us to do. We are following His lead, and we become fishers of people, helping to bring them back to shore when they have been lost at sea.

Yesterday was Pentecost, which is historically and Biblically the day when the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples of Jesus, and I looked up speaking in tongues because that is one of the signs of the Spirit that the disciples experienced. It is amazing to me that there is a theological discussion and argument that goes on around that topic because it is something that I do and I know what it is, at least for me. I didn’t realize how much argument and discussion there is around something that is so basic a part of my own personal experience. The first church that I attended after I was born again was from a Pentecostal background – it was less strict and more open-minded, but speaking in tongues was commonplace. When I started to speak in tongues there were only a few words and then more would come over time, and I asked the Lord to explain to me what I was saying and He started to show me that the words that I was using were from Hebrew and Aramaic. They were always related to things that He wanted to highlight and talk to me about, things that had to do with faith or something in particular that I was dealing with that had a Biblical reference. But according to what I was reading, there are people who “put on” speaking in tongues and who learn how to do it by copying other people and practicing. Why would anyone want to do that? But there is a thing that goes on in some churches that people feel like they need to have that as a sign that they are really saved. It’s so sad to think that some people feel the need to pretend and put on a show in order to be accepted as people of faith. Why not just do the things that God asks us to do? Why not just follow Him?

My fisherman friend doesn’t speak in tongues, at least not that I know of, but he speaks in the language of the heart which is the language of God. Outward signs like tongues can be wonderful, but it is better I think when what we feel in our hearts comes through to others in actions that show how much we love and care for them. There’s a very sappy song that keeps coming to mind as I write this, “Reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this world a better place if you can.” I like sappy songs sometimes because they really do come from the heart. My fisherman friend is a real man, not sappy in the least, a man’s man, tough as they come, but his heart is so beautiful that he makes the world a better place by just being in it.

When I look at that photograph and look back on that time in my life and the freshness and newness of life that I had been given once again, I think of those people that God put into my life to wrap His love and care around me. God promises us that He will be our daily bread, that He will give us rivers of living water so that we will never thirst, and He does this by giving us His Spirit. When Jesus does His miracles of feeding thousands of people with small amounts of food, He chooses to feed them with bread - His bread of life - and also with fish. When He has gone to the cross and risen from the dead, He appears to His disciples on the seashore once again and makes them a breakfast of fish after helping them catch more fish than their nets can hold. The sign of Jesus is known among some as a fish - you see it on cars and t-shirts and signs. My fisherman friend, in doing what he did from his heart, was showing the Spirit of God that lives in him. 

Blessings,

Jannie Susan