When Your Heart Leaps

Yesterday when I was on the subway I saw a Pastor I hadn’t seen in five years. The first time she met me, she said, “My heart leapt when I saw you, the way the baby jumped in Elizabeth’s womb when she saw Mary when she was pregnant with the baby Jesus.” (Luke 1:44) I was only recently born again, not even a year, maybe six or seven months, and I had only just started to read a Bible that someone had given to me, but I already knew the story. That is how God works – how He speaks to us – He’ll make sure we know what He’s talking about and then He’ll send someone to confirm something He wants us to know.

Another Pastor who I met about another six or seven months later told me how amazed He was at how mature a Christian I was in so short a time. I’d had other people say that to me, and one of them had said, “He sure worked fast!” My answer was, “He had to. It was a long time coming.” I was 39 years old when I was born again – notice I didn’t say years young – I’d wasted a lot of years walking around in darkness, and He had to work fast or I wouldn’t have been ready for the work He had planned for me. He was sending me into urban ministry, straight into some of the places where the devil has his biggest strongholds, and I’d have to know how to stand my ground and not back down when all the forces of hell were coming against me.

Standing our ground with Jesus doesn’t have anything to do with personal courage – if I had my way I’d be sitting on my favorite beach year round not doing anything much at all. I hate confrontation, and even though it doesn’t feel good, I’d rather just let people steam roll over me than try to stand up for myself. But there’s something that happens when the Holy Spirit comes to live inside you – you just can’t do the same old things any more.

And you don’t see people or things the same way any more. There’s something called discernment that all of a sudden we start to have. We start seeing who people really are, what they’re really like, and it can be very surprising sometimes. There will be a person who everyone thinks is just great, but you’ll meet them and it will seem like there’s just something not right to you. You might even get taken in because everyone else is telling you how great they are, but there’s something nagging at you that something just isn’t right. You might justify it to yourself, thinking, oh, they’re just having a bad day, or maybe there’s something going on in their personal life, but no matter how you try to justify, you still have that nagging feeling that there’s something you’re not seeing. It will even jump out at you sometimes, and then they’ll put it quickly back under cover, a flash of the eye, a sharp word, a word of judgment or gossip about someone else, maybe even a seemingly small lie, but it’s there all the same, something that doesn’t come from the Spirit of God, and still you keep thinking they must be ok because everyone else says they are and they seem to have everything in its right Christian order. But then one day you see them for who they really are, and you wonder why you didn’t see it all along, and then the Lord shows you that you did.

But then there are times when we meet someone and our heart leaps. The Spirit in us sees the Spirit in them and they both jump up and down for joy. Those are the best times, the times when we know we have found our way to a place that feels like home. When the Pastor said that to me, it was to let me know what she saw in me so that I’d have no doubt that what I was calling the Spirit of God was real. It was also to let me know that other people would see it too – sometimes they’d leap for joy, but sometimes the spirits in them would get angry or hostile or try to go after me because that’s what evil spirits do. When she said that to me, it was to let me know who I belonged to, so I’d know no matter what anyone said that I was a child of God.

Seeing that Pastor yesterday brought back that time and her words so strongly. I needed that reminder because of some things I’ve been dealing with for such a long time that I have grown weary with trying to stand under the burden. I’ve had moments of peace, but it has been such a difficult time that it can be easy to forget that He who lives in me is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4), because I can forget that I have the Spirit of God living in me at all. It’s been a time of constant attack, an attack on my faith and my own person, a time that I should be able to say, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1) and yet instead I do fear and I do feel afraid and I do doubt and worry and all of the other things that Jesus tells us we don’t need to do.

There are times when we need a word from God and He’ll give it to us in a simple and straightforward way, one that we are not expecting, and one that we can understand in the depth of our spirit immediately. Seeing that Pastor was one of those times. Just seeing her made me think of the first time we met and the words she had said to me, and all of the other things she had shared with me, and where we both have been and gone in our lives. Seeing her reminded me of who I was and who I am and let me know that who I become is all in the Lord’s hands and not anyone else’s.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan