Spirit Flow

I've been asking for the Spirit, for more of Christ in me. As I cry out in spiritual thirst, I pray that the Lord may grant me a time of moving prayer or an amazing, life-changing scriptural insight. I've imagined a mystical closeness; a supernatural overflowing in my soul; an easy willingness to obey His commands.

But that's not what I'm getting. I ask and ask again for the Spirit and I am surrounded by people. My life overflows with people. Projects and events and meetings and deliveries and meals and games and movies, all full of people.

I long for the Spirit, and I'm not sure what I'm asking for. My motives are likely crooked. I'm looking for a knowledge or a power that I can wield. I ask to understand a mystery and to contain the wind, both impossible, yet promised to me. I ask and ask again. I read of Him and use His language, "fill me, rest on me, come upon me, carry me, instruct me, be poured out on me, enter me, lift me, fall on me, speak through me, gift me, give me life." This is what He has done for the saints in the past and I want to feel that sweetness, too.

As my faith leads me to ask for the Spirit, in the same breath He is come. I want to collect Him like a treasure, but He does not want a stopped bottle or a lidded jar. I cannot catch the Living Stream and the Flowing Fountain in a cup for myself to sip at will. I must keep coming back to drink. Return to Him and return again. And there are all these people.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all... (1 Corinthians 12:7)

What I receive in answer to my prayer for the Bread of Life and for Living Water, does not belong to me. These gifts are for the benefit of all, for the Church, for the Body of Christ. And when I ask God to come near, when I reach for the Spirit, the people always come near, too. Why would God fill me up with the Spirit if not for the benefit of those He loves? Why overflow my cup if there's no one around to collect the abundance and give glory to Christ for it all?

Even if I'm simply a conduit, this is grace to me, too. The kind of grace that forms and bends me and makes me new. For what is it I fear most in the world if not people? Rejection and abandonment have trained me to self protect. My selfish fear growls like a bear while I'm in these crowds and I want a different way.

But to keep in step with the Spirit it's necessary that my toes get stepped on, that the floors of my home feel the tread of strange feet, and that the doors of my heart open to the people God sends my way. When I choose this I am born new again and the seeming paradox - that God is strongest in my weakness- is like honey and I pray again, "Though I am afraid, please Holy Spirit, come."

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8)