The Holy Spirit also does crazy things. We should expect this as we seek to love in Jesus’ name. Here are two stories that I can tell, personally. 

When I was seventeen, I went on a retreat with a youth group and decided that what I was experiencing in my faith could not be what was meant by “having a personal relationship with Jesus,” a phrase I heard all the time and to which I had basically become inoculated. So I prayed, believing there was more to be experienced. I mean, if the God of the universe cared about me and you could have a relationship with Him, what did that look like? It certainly had to look different than my current life, a large part of which consisted of trying really hard not to watch pornography, then watching pornography, then trying really hard not to watch pornography. I was committed to not pretending anymore, because I felt like my Christianity didn’t run very deep, even though I sincerely believed in Jesus. I was already tired of trying to be a “good Christian” and of the failure and hypocrisy I felt beneath the surface. I needed to know that God was truly there. As I prayed, walking alone along the cold, neon-drenched streets of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, I said, “I know there’s more, God, and I know You are going to show me now. Because I can’t do this anymore.” My discontent anchored me into a prayer that was born, all at once, of dissatisfaction, faith, and resolve. And so I waited. 

A few weeks later, a friend took me to a Bible study, where I sat in the back of a room of fifty or sixty people listening to Joe, a Bible teacher unlike any I’d ever heard, talk about shame. At the end of the study, Joe had everyone bow their heads to pray. I dutifully did the same, as I had done a thousand times before. But suddenly, as Joe prayed, I felt something leave my body through the top of my head. This is hard to describe, but it was like a wave of energy being pulled like a handkerchief out of a pocket, followed by a sudden emptiness. “What on earth?” I thought with alarm, my body tensing. But right after it happened, Joe stopped mid-word in his prayer and said, “Wait, hold on. Someone was just delivered from a spirit of shame.” 

Okay, seriously… what? Joe couldn’t see me; I was leaning over on my knees in my chair at the back of the room, and even if he had, how could he know what had just happened? Somehow, he had sensed a change of spiritual energy in the room. But what in the world was a “spirit of shame?”[1]

I freaked out. Or I would have, if I’d had the time. Everything was suddenly moving in slow motion, as if all the adrenaline in my body had released. I could feel and hear my heartbeat pumping blood through my body, echoing in my ears. I had trouble moving, like a thick blanket was resting on me, or like I was stuck in Jell-O. I raised my hand and stopped the proceedings, saying, “I don’t know what’s happening, but…something’s happening to me.” 

Joe said, “Praise God!” and came over, laying his hands on my head before he started to pray for me. He spoke in tongues, which I had never heard before, and then he started praying in words I understood: “God has heard your prayer. He’s seen every prayer you’ve made, your desire for more. And He is your Father.” I started crying. And then (how do I describe this?), waves of energy coursed through my body. It literally overpowered me so that I had to get out of my chair and onto the floor. And I wept. Not because the encounter was so physically powerful and comforting (though it was), but because in that moment, I knew it was all true: God was good and real and loving. Every sensation in mind, body, and spirit was of pure, overpowering love. There was a reality behind all the Bible stories and all the doctrine and theology I had been taught. There was something—rather, Someone—True and Good behind it all. 

I wish that this sort of thing happened every week. But it doesn’t. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, before or since (though it did open my senses to the Holy Spirit in a new way). But that night, that encounter changed my life.

When we read the New Testament, it’s clear that this sort of experience was completely normal. And normative. In the early church, regular encounter with the Holy Spirit was just “how it was.” Paul expected people to be filled with the Spirit in radical ways.[2] We, on the other hand, tend to view anything outside the norm as “too weird.” Furthermore, our expectation of encounter today is usually dumbed down by a general suspicion within Christianity (and certainly within Protestantism) of personal experience. There’s a fear that we're all going to start putting too much emphasis on subjective experience and not enough on Scripture. In a post-Enlightenment Christianity that’s supremely concerned with objective truth and with maintaining the undisputed authority of Scripture, this is a huge concern.[3] It’s easy to look at experience askance, as though it’s something not to be trusted and possibly something to be dismissed entirely. But the problem is, that’s not what we see in Scripture itself! Indeed, when we read the Bible, it’s full of people having experiences with God. Think of Paul on the Damascus Road: it was an encounter that transformed him in a way that Scripture never did, even though he knew the Hebrew Scripture as well as his most zealous contemporaries.[4] The Bible is full of similar examples of radical encounter. 

Perhaps, then, we should simply expect more? Perhaps expectation is part of the path to encounter? My experience with God increasingly leads me to conclude that we should expect the unexpected. Case in point: one more story, this one about my big toe. 

About a year after the encounter at the Bible study, I had an ingrown toenail that I could not get to go away. I was afraid I might have to have surgery because it was constantly infected. One Sunday, I went to a church gathering and the pastor said, “We’re going to do something different this morning. We're going to ask anybody in our congregation who has a sense of what we need to pray for to just speak it out. Because we see in the Scripture that the Holy Spirit will direct us what to pray for. It’s called a word of knowledge.” 

I sat there thinking, “This is weird, but at least it should be entertaining.” People started saying, “I feel like we’re supposed to pray for X. I feel like we’re supposed to pray for Y.” Then somebody stood up and said, “I know this is strange, but in my mind I keep seeing this picture of a big toe and I feel like we’re supposed to pray for someone’s big toe.”

I immediately raised my hand and said, “That’s me!”, my alacrity surprising even myself. The man walked over and put his hand on my toe and, in front of the entire congregation, prayed that my toe would be healed. And…

Nothing happened. 

Well, nothing happened right in that moment. But within two days, my toe got better. After twelve months, the problem simply disappeared. 

I don’t get this, truth be told. My mind has, at points, gotten completely knotted trying to understand this sort of thing. There are many things we pray for that don’t seem to get resolved, certainly not in the manner we would like or on our preferred timeline. There are starving children all around the world, for goodness’ sake. And here I am getting my toe healed? How does that make any sense?

And yet, God cares about my toe. I am reminded of Jesus’ words, “The very hairs on your head are all numbered.”[5] So while I can’t make sense of it in my brain, my heart is open to the reality of a God who sees and knows and breaks through in whatever ways He can (or that He’s allowed to break through), to bring life and wholeness.[6] I don’t understand all these things. I don’t understand how that particular prayer in Gatlinburg connected to my experience at the Bible study, when prayers I’ve prayed at other times with what felt like the same resolve haven’t been answered as clearly. But it pushes me into the place beyond words, where I don’t have all the answers and yet can simply sit before the mystery of God, knowing that He is good, giving thanks for the mystery which humbles me and opens me to Him, grateful for whatever experiences convince me that the heart of God is far more generous than I could have hoped.[7]

The point is simply that people need genuine God encounter, however it comes. Ourselves included. It doesn’t have to be a physical healing or even a physical sensation. It doesn’t have to be charismatic (whatever we mean by that word), but it needs to be real and authentic. I’m not talking about just chasing after experience, either; the point is to connect with who God is, not to have wild experiences. But again, when we read Scripture, it was normative for people to encounter God in wild ways. These sorts of “weird” things were just part of what Jesus did. The out-of-the-ordinary. The supernatural. And they are still a part of what He does. At the same time, the “weird” can also be quite normal and quite natural. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

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[1] There isn’t space in this chapter to explore the answer to this question, but for an interesting read, I’d suggest Richard Beck’s Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted. Fortress Press. Minneapolis, MN. 2016.

[2] Cf. Galatians 3:5.

[3] Post-Enlightenment, Protestants emphasized the authority of Scripture, whereas Catholics put greater focus on the authority of the pope, bishops, and Catholic tradition. Both did so in order to keep pace with Modernity’s focus on reason, science, and ultimate truth. 

[4] Philippians 3:4-6.

[5] Matthew 10:30, Luke 12:7.

[6] When I say “that He’s allowed to break through,” I am thinking, for example, of Mark 6:5, in which the unbelief of the crowd surrounding Jesus limits the ability of the Divine wholeness—the Kingdom—to break through. 

[7] See Psalm 131 as a grounding point for sitting in humility, trust, and mystery.