A Dialogue begins Part 5

A dialogue takes two into the conversation. It needs a relationship. I wrote previously about a relationship with God through Jesus that I started as a young girl. Inevitably I expected something more, experientially. I was taught, at least I read up on 'God-encounters'. Maybe that led to me desiring it personally. People talked about their own experiences and even supernatural phenomena happening. I could not deny it in them but neither could I own it in me.

A challenge came to participate in a beach mission team. I had watched these teams in action as a kid, as a young teenager. How could I get up on a soapbox (they didn't have literal ones)? Use a microphone to preach? The evangelist in question was scary - to me at least. A graduate of Cliff college in the later 1950s I guess, he had taken evangelistic meetings even in my own village a few years earlier, when I was around 13. It was at the pre-summer expedition rally that I responded to a well-known preacher, Selwyn Hughes' call for those wanting empowerment to witness through the power of the Holy Spirit; a fairly standard thing to do in that environment. Nothing happened to me. Not there and then. Only the next day did I find myself totally 'out of the norm' unaware of what was being sung or preached in a little Methodist chapel in North

Humberside. An enveloping of me in 'warm flame-coloured waves of love' is the only way to describe it. Is that what experiencing the 'ineffable' means? I try to avoid those 'hairy big words'; maybe they were invented because the language did not stretch well enough. The next thing I was aware of was the folk around me pushing me out of the door and passing the 'scary' evangelist not being scared at all of him. Perfect love does push out fears. Result? I could 'bear witness' to my faith in public, boldly! Really.

Empowered! At least, not scared silly! A revelation of the power of love that was 'out of this world', the world of the conscious. Well, my mother saw the difference. My school mates did too as I set to establishing a Christian Union in the new opportunity provided by my newly amalgamated school. I did not spend just one week on a mission that summer, but three. I then proceeded for 3 years to spend 6 weeks each summer with that mission on various beaches. And what was more- becoming the willing evangelist of the Christian Union at Manchester University, in its Student Union building; more fool me? Well, I learned how not to be a bull in a china shop! Revelation to Relationship to revealing that relationship to others! It was a beginning.