I was that man
I know a man, who fourteen years ago, was seized by Christ and swept away in ecstasy to the heights of heaven. I really don’t know if this took place in the body or out of it; only God knows. But I also know that this man was hijacked into paradise…that he heard the unspeakable spoken. This is the man I want to talk about. 2 Corinthians 12: 1-4
It was October 1982, now nearly four decades ago that it happened to me, ‘this man’. When in those places when we meet God in our own experience..sacred space…attempting to describe the moment quickly exhausts any vocabulary in trying to even get close. Ever saying anything about it was also very frightening. Even though I had grown up Nazarene—originating as a part of the Pentecostal movement of the early 1900s—I'd not been around people who claimed to see visions. I’d heard the shouting, the running the aisles, but never did anyone during Wednesday night testimonies talk of visions. I seriously considered others would think I was crazy. I wondered myself.
Back then as the director of the non-profit, we had our major fund raiser in early March every year which meant that beginning before the holidays until mid-March, I lived, ate and slept fund raising. But underneath all this annual stress were some raw realities of my life. Outwardly I was a blessed, lucky man. I had a great wife and two young beautiful little girls. I had become an executive director of this non-profit before I was 30. We had a good church and great social network---or at least so we thought. But inside I was eaten up with issues I had carried since childhood. I had had a steady diet of ‘hellfire and damnation’ preaching most of my life. It was to the point that I had concluded that it was probably better to jump out in front of that bus the evangelist screamed about in the Sunday evening evangelistic service…the service that if you did not get things right with God right now, you’d step out the door of the church that night, be hit by ‘that bus’ and ushered into eternal doom and damnation. So, it made sense to me to go to the altar, get right, and then run in front of the bus! Pretty fatalistic huh? But I seriously thought that.
This preaching along with an angry, rage-full, name calling dad, I struggled with having any understanding of a loving God. Oh, I was doing very well to look on the outside…a seminary degree, a church staff position, teaching at a Christian college as well as singles Sunday school, multiple church committees and boards at the local and denominational levels, President of the denominational social work organization, singing in the choir and now director of a Christian para-church agency. Quite a resume! But inside I was done….stick a fork in me DONE! And in March of that year I was angry. I was angry at life and the fact that all the weight I’d carried all those years had not shifted one bit. And God did not seem to give a damn. Then something else happened just days after the annual banquet. Mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor and went within the week to surgery. That began what was weeks and weeks in and out of the hospital with flights back and forth to Oklahoma. Gratefully it ended with her recovering from a coma that we were certain would take her life. All the stress and worry from her trauma gave me a cover for the other issues that were haunting me. It even crossed my mind that her tumor was my fault, God’s way of punishing me (that distorted, narcissistic way of seeing things was in my head).
It was while I was in Tulsa for the first of mom’s three surgeries that I had lunch with David, my friend since we'd met as sophomores in high school. After he confessed a situation he was currently in the midst of, I confessed to David what was going on inside…he had already put together much of it. He and his family had been such a God send while back in high school when my father was creating major family upheaval. One of my therapists years later said that I emotionally divorced my family at seventeen...it was David’s family that 'adopted me'...now he served as my 'priest' allowing me to unload. But he was 750 miles away before the internet, emails and mobile phones so I felt the need to talk closer to home. I chose to open up with two local buddies, Lee and Jim. A couple of years before we had worked together with others planning an inner city conference at TNC. Because we had enjoyed the camaraderie of those planning meetings we had kept getting together regularly. I still feared that more disclosure would ultimately destroy me, but then it felt the stress and anger was going to eventually anyway.
During that summer I made several stupid choices in my search for answers as to what was going on within me. From what I’d seen in the past, the church community in which I was immersed would crucify me (they had others and have done so since), so my desperation drove me down some dark roads.
By October I was exhausted…physically, emotionally and spiritually. On the third Sunday that autumn I was entering the choir loft while in a running conversation with God---the vengeful angry one that had me dangling over hell hanging by a thin thread. I was telling Him “I am done, I will not live another 33 years like this” I told Him had never experienced this 'loving God Father’ others had talked about, the one of grace and mercy. I said that like Elisha in the book of second Kings, if He’d told me to go down to the Cumberland River (not far away) to wash seven times to be ‘healed’, I was so tired I couldn’t drag myself there.
It was then that I saw the ceiling in the corner of the sanctuary begin to open. No, not physically but it might as well have. It was like layers of clouds, one after the other, that kept parting. (Rather like what you see as you look up into a 20 story atrium hotel). The layers or floors symbolized the many layers/aspects of my life. At the top of the ‘hotel’ was an intense, blinding light…one so bright that it was almost painful to look into it. It also seemed to be pulsing. At first, with my history I thought the throbbing of the light was a battle between goodness and evil. As has been well said, we don’t see thing as they are, we see things as we are. Was the brightness God? An angel? It definitely appeared to be something celestial the likeness of which I’d never ‘seen’. As I was looking into the brightness, something ‘said’ to me (although not audibly), “there is nothing for you to do Michael, just receive...take what I've continually been offering you”. I had heard variations of that statement in Sunday school and church all my life, but in that moment, it was like someone threw a 220 volt relay switch and the truth of that statement reached deep inside for the first time.
As quickly as it had come, it was gone. Yet, time is suspended in sacred space.
I was shocked, dumbfounded for a good while. I was thinking “you are so stressed, now you are conjuring up visions in your craziness”. So I told no one, not even my wife, because I thought it would sound so ‘out of my mind’. What I know now, not saying anything is the best way to handle it. In fact in most of the encounters mentioned in the scriptures, they are often instructed to tell no one. Other times they were struck dumb or blind. I got no such instruction but the fears I was experiencing kept me quiet. Yet I felt different inside.
Over the next few days and weeks, when we would sing the old hymns, I was overwhelmed with emotion. I had this uncanny sense that I knew the writer personally because their words could have been my own. Before this experience, the prompting to have a quiet time or devotional time daily was worse than having teeth pulled…dry as dust. Now, to open the Bible was like letters from home. I developed an appetite for it and longed to read more. It was like when you are in college and you daily head to your mailbox after class in hopes of finding some mail---even to ‘occupant’. What I was reading was sent directly to me, it had my name on it.
My first ten years in Nashville I taught social work part time at Trevecca college and was teaching a class that fall. A couple of weeks past the Sunday morning I describe two of my best students, Julie Smith Runyan and Kent Hughes, came up to me after class and asked what had happened to me. I had said absolutely nothing but they both said that I had changed in the last two weeks, that I seemed like a different person. Julie was one of the most sensitive, angelic spirits that I have ever met my entire life…others thought so as well. When the world lost her to cancer prematurely a few years later, we all felt a huge loss. But Julie and Kent’s observations stunned me, like I had inadvertently let something slip or like an absent-minded professor, my fly was open. I began to realize that whatever had happened that Sunday was very real.
I have tried on rare occasion over the years to share this experience with others but it often did not go so well. Either my words failed to describe it or the other person feels bad as they go to a place of ‘well, nothing like that has ever happened to me’ which made me regret saying anything.
All I know that sitting in the preaching today and hearing Paul of the scriptures make that statement of being ‘swept away into ecstasy to the heights of heaven’, I knew I needed to write about my experience. Have I had others visions since that Sunday, no. Have I had other experiences ‘in sacred space’ with God since then, oh yes! The God I know today is 180 degrees from the one I kept my distance from those first thirty-three years.
Even though that sanctuary has been remodeled since 1982, I was in there last summer for a wedding and looked over to that corner of the ceiling wondering if the new plaster and paint had covered the hole….no it hadn’t. In my mind’s eye it was still as clear as that third Sunday in October decades ago. Do I live in a consistent consciousness of that moment? No I don’t but then I don’t think anybody who has experienced anything similar ever does. Yet it is like an Ebenezer, a stone I sat upright in the desert of my life that on days I forget or the clouds have not parted, I can crawl my way back to that place where I am reminded like my ancestors of old, God revealed himself to me there…in place, in time…inside.
That is well enough. Way well enough.
First draft 9/14/08,
Post script: As I think about that moment years ago I believe desperation had a lot to do with it. Some would say I dared God to come through. Maybe so…and that sounds pretty dangerous. Had he been the angry ONE I’d thought he was, I could of been a pile of ash in a choir loft chair. There is a verse that says something about God loving those who desperately seek Him. In a way, he loves being pursued as much as we do. It is the nature of love itself. It wasn’t because of magic, and as I said it was not because I’d been used to sitting in services where people talked about visions all the time. Please don’t go down the road that God doesn’t do such things for you…that He loves you less. That is nowhere near the truth. The only advice I would give you is that in your times of frustration, desperation and feeling like giving up…let it all out to God. He’s heard it all…whatever language you choose to use. He’s got broad shoulders, long arms and is a good listener. And, he’s been after you from the get go.
Recent edit 3/2021