Conversation with God. David C. Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ more frequently than is ‘normal.’ Events moved rapidly from this point on, and by the end of the week the toilets had been segregated on the basis of ignorant fear rather than gender, whilst the heating was cut off pending our payment of the rent. Such an irrevocable breakdown in inter-office relationships seemed to offer no prospect of an end to these frustrations, and our forced vacation of the premises seemed inevitable.

      Every day, in the privacy of the bathroom I had been praying, praying for an end to this insoluble, and now worsened situation of trying to carry on working at the office. In circumstances where one’s very spirit is being sapped by the hopelessness of continual illness, I prayed for help as I set my plans to vacate the offices. The first answer to prayer came in the form of a visit from a man who had just set up in the business of office relocation. It was a quite literal ‘Godsend,’ he dealt with everything from telephones to office furniture removal, and by the middle of February we were out of that place. Importantly, the actual move was achieved in complete secrecy across a single weekend—in order to avoid unpleasantness and perhaps further harassment—and we were able to leave those offices on Friday night, beginning work in our new location on Monday morning. On that morning, I found myself working in the huge attic room of our home; exactly the same place where in Victorian times, a previous owner of the house had operated his silk weaving machine. If our evacuation from the office in ‘Dunkirk’ style had been a second answer to prayer, then the wrath of our erstwhile landlord, seeking legal restitution for his perceived losses, would require further supplications to our new Helper.

      Help Arrives

      I can’t remember those early prayers much, except to say that they were blunt, brief, and contained a lot of pleas for help. Although, I obviously prayed for help with our office problems, my predominant recollection of the time is of constantly praying for help for Chris, but without having any idea of the form such help could, or would take. Later on, I discovered that the number of people praying for Chris at about this time, eventually reached nine hundred or so, and amongst the first of those people, one in particular played a key role. Within the family, Chris had a special rapport with her sister Margaret, whose concern for Chris’s predicament had prompted a discussion with a close friend. Margaret’s friend had a Christian sister, who, on hearing the story, became ‘burdened’ with the need to pray for Chris’s healing, and requested a meeting with, or visit to Chris—both of which were denied. Unable to meet with Chris, and finding her prayers for healing to be unsuccessful, she changed the tack of her prayers, praying instead for local Christians to contact Chris. At about the time of our relocation of the business, that contact came via a Christian friend of Chris’s youngest sister, Janice. On hearing Chris’s harrowing tale, Janice’s friend, who was a member of a small (healing) prayer group, initially asked if the group could pray for her. Permission was given for this, but when a few weeks later the group asked to pray with Chris, her consternation was clear, and to consternation was soon added surprise, when she found her erstwhile agnostic husband actively encouraging her to meet these people. The agnostic, of course, professes to have no knowledge of God, and even the acknowledgement of theism, which had been required prior to joining my ‘fraternal fellowship,’ did not change that. Chris knew nothing of my secret vow in Harlech, and thought I was still an ignoramus (Latin equivalent of the Greek term: agnostic). Nevertheless she agreed to a first meeting with the group, whilst I thrilled with delight at the sheer improbability that this contact could ever have come about.

      Conversion No. 2

      In other words, I was delighted and amazed at the reality of answered prayer coming in the form of an actual healing prayer group, all four of whom worshipped at a local Baptist church. As a new (secret) Christian of only six or eight weeks standing, and not having had any contact whatsoever with other Christians, I didn’t even know that such things as healing prayer groups existed. Although I could not know it, these were, of course, significant times in Christian circles, following as they did, the John Wimber/Vineyard Movement visits to Britain. One of the John Wimber ‘tours’ had included a visit to a north of England church, which was pastored at that time by the current principal of Spurgeon’s College, London, thereby engendering a fairly local Baptist connection and influence. In the perfect hindsight of a theological training, I now recognize the Wimber influence on this group of sincere, believing Christians, who for two years became a rock of support for Chris.

      The group were brimming with enthusiasm and were avidly reading a wide selection of the popular, charismatic books that circulated at the time, especially those with an emphasis on healing. Looking back, it is clear that they anticipated fairly early success in the form of physical healing, but in this, they were to be largely disappointed, instead fulfilling another, very much needed function. Apart from the first two or three meetings, the group met with Chris at our home where the chief result of their prayers, was the indescribable feeling of peace that she experienced. The peace of God (Phil. 4:7) was in fact guarding the thoughts of Chris’s mind (heart) from the psychological troubles of her anorexia. Again and again, Chris met with the group simply in order to experience that peace, and it was this that, in part, ultimately led to her commitment to Christ. It was about four weeks into these meetings with the prayer group that I disclosed to Chris my own prior commitment to Christ, and how their involvement in our lives could only have been the result of prayer. Easter was early that year, and on April 1st. Chris committed her life to the LORD, later often remarking on the appropriateness of ‘April fools day.’ Interestingly, in her prayer of commitment she too struck a deal, for she had recently formed a friendship with a social worker, and asked the LORD to maintain that friendship outside its current professional confines. The prayer of commitment had been prayed from the heart privately, but in a subsequent meeting, the prayer group insisted that this was ‘ratified’ by being repeated aloud, adding in a more stylized line or two of ‘normal’ commitment prayer. In the following weeks, as we began to read our bibles, we felt it was incumbent upon us to meet with other Christians on a fairly regular basis, and so we became members of that same local Baptist church. But throughout, we never lost the specialness, which had derived from having made personal, almost unaided, commitments to the LORD.

      Requesting the “Gifts”

      From the outset of their Christian commitments, Western Christians suffer from almost insurmountable difficulties in their relationship with God, which derive entirely from their cultural heritage. Indeed, the whole emphasis of our culture rests upon the cult of the individual, whose prosperity and welfare are the mainspring of the policies of all the political parties, of whatever hue. Individualism is now to all intents and purposes, the single most virulent philosophy driving our society, holding metaphysical hands with those other modern philosophies, pluralism and humanism. The ‘Enlightenment’ which arguably began in the seventeenth century, and which has bequeathed huge advances in material prosperity, has also brought about an intellectual ‘sea change,’ profound in its consequences. In essence, the perception of self has changed, and the increasing sense of selfhood has been understood as the transformation of ‘public man’ into ‘private man,’ or psychologisation. The psychologisation process is, in effect, the internalisation of public, corporate man—once exemplified by external indications of rank such as clothing and apparel—into the modern individual known today. All this has consequences for Christians, who respond to their social nurturing by unwittingly placing undue emphasis upon their individual relationship with God, and this is particularly exemplified in their prayer life. It must be emphasized here, that the concept of an individual relationship is quite different from the concept of a personal relationship, and it remains one of the misfortunes of modern society, that this distinction has become so blurred. When acknowledging that Christians have a personal relationship with God, it is necessary to understand that this was intended to be lived out in a corporate environment, and personal prayer also took place primarily within that same environment. New Testament prayer was fundamentally a corporate activity, often to be found within households, that is, amongst (and between) families, and the fundamental unit of the family still remains the relationship between husband and wife.

      In response to this shared heritage of social nurture as an individual, I prayed alone—as СКАЧАТЬ