TESTIMONY FOR WINDS-A-MIGHTY-VOICE WEB SITE:

It is the purpose of this testimony to show the wonderful ways in which God works through His Holy Spirit, far beyond anything we can do or say. Perhaps the one single most important factor In following the leading of the Holy Spirit is to go where He leads, no matter where that may be. This is easy to say, or even easier to write, but it is the concrete act of obedience which makes real the presence of God in the world. When this obedience is a matter of life and death, the stakes are higher as well as simpler. The Martyr suffers, the martyr dies, the martyr lives the power of the presence of God through the Holy Spirit. What the Western Church has forgotten is that this witness is equally powerful and important whether or not it is a situation of life and death. In other words, martyrdom in a self centered society filled with the indifference of Laodicean faith has a specific difficulty which is not trivial. While it may not rise to the pitch of pain of dying or suffering torture for Christ, there is a corresponding psychological pain of indifference which may last a lifetime. It may seem insensitive to compare intense physical pain resulting in death to a lifetime of psychological pain due to indifference. The reason I do so is to help clarify the fact that martyrdom exists for those who walk in the Spirit no matter where they live in the world. It is only the forms of suffering which are different.

Let me bring this down to earth. I am 49 years old, I have a 17 year old daughter going into her Senior year in High School, whose mother was married to me for 22 years, but is now married to someone else. I was born in Brazil to a teenage couple, one was 19, the other 20, who were not married. I grew up in Brazil, raised mainly by my Grandmother, until my mother married a recently divorced american businessman. we then moved to California, where we lived for five years, in Oakland. In January 1968, because of my step Father's engineering business, we moved to London, where I attended An english School. The Last two years of High School I had the opportunity to go to a boarding school in Switzerland, care of the company. My parents returned to Brazil in 1971, and I began college in Portland, Oregon. On October 31 1971 I walked into a church and became a Christian in mid-stride. I sat in the Service and suddenly I knew everything the Pastor to be saying to be true. I have lived in Christ ever since.

I was married three years after graduating and our daughter was born in 1985, six years after we married. In the meantime I had attended Seminary and become ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA, served a church as Pastor, and had begun what turned out to be a ten year careeer as a Chaplain to Mentally Retarded Adults, easily the greatest privilege I have ever had. From these adults I learned what is real and concrete, and how to live in reality. My wife and I were divorced after 22 years of marriage in November of 2000, on the Monday after Thanksgiving. We had already been separated since September 1, 1998. It was the morning of that day that I woke up in a parallel universe. It looked the same as the one I had lived in previously, but everything had completely changed in this terrifying new world.

It was on that fateful day that I realized, for the first time, that I had only God to depend on, and nothing else. Yes, I had found Jesus as my Savior 27 years earlier, but this was different. This was a martyrdom as total as death. It was not a physical but rather a relational death, in which everything I had ever worked for or held close in my heart, had died. I discovered that only God had survived the transition to this new parallel universe. God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was the only thing, person, reality on which I could rely, and if I was to survive the shock of divorce, I knew that God would have to pull me through.

One week after the divorce I was admitted at McLean, a well known mental hospital outside of Boston. McLean is practically across the road from the last institution in which I served as Chaplain, only now I was no longer on staff, I was one of the patients. I was already on five different psychotropic medications for clinical depression, at least two of which had very high doses. In other words, I was primed for disaster. As I discussed the situation with other patients in my program, I found that indeed God continued to watch over me. I met many people who were homeless, involved in custody battles, or on their way to or coming out of jail. Many of us were professionals who had lived the good life, and now found ourselves scraping the bottom of reality as we had known it. In our new condition we found new bottoms. This is part and parcel of the terror of mental illness. At the moment of greatest need, not only are the familiar sources of support gone, but the illness itself shuts off external support. It was at this time that I discovered that God is indeed everywhere, for he had made this combination science fiction and horror story transition along with me. I found that I am the book and he is the author, and that he has already written the end of the story. thank God the story has a happy ending: and he lived happily ever after with Dad....

I remember, during this time of terror, praying for hours at a time, able only to think of one thing: God is Faithful. I think it is the same as being in military combat, once you have faced the Beast Face to Face, and you see first hand that the only interest it has in you is to devour you, and you see that it cannot, only because God prevents the Beast from making lunch out of you, then, and only then, do you know that God is faithful.

Walking through the world stripped of my identity and of everything I had ever worked for, I found the faithfulness of God to be the only stability I had. It was during this time that the presence of the Holy Spirit grew in my life from a concept to a reality. To my surprise, I discovered that far from a vague, amorphous king of being, that the Holy Spirit was extremely specific - hyperspecific, if you will. There was nothing indeterminate about Him. He led me to this place, with this person, to do this task, now, and only now, and only in one specific way. I was a slow learner. But the Spirit persevered as I clung to my faithful Lord like a drowning man clung to a piece of driftwood, and slowly I found that I was no longing in danger of drowning, and after awhile I found that I was actually resting.

I believe that the single factor which most clearly shows the work of the Holy Spirit in my life, especially in the last four years, is my relationship with Dave Withe. Since I am writing this to post on a web site that Dave is developing, and since he is my boss, and since he has been walking with me in the Spirit since I started working with him 18 months ago, it is easy to assume that I am merely currying favor in the worst and most craven and wordly way possible. You can assume that, of course, and I can't stop you. But you would be wrong.

When I walked into Dave's office and sat down for a job interview, the first thing I saw was a sign about Jesus: no Jesus, no Peace, Know Jesus, Know Peace. the sign is still there. Within a very short time we were talking about ministry, and after 45 minutes of this, not really talking about the job much, if at all, I informed Dave that many people had been praying I would find the right job, with the right person, in the right place. I told Dave, "I think this is it."

The mercy of God has been strong in our work together. We recognized in time that the Lord was calling us to a closer walk in the Spirit, and that doing this in a work environment presented some real difficulties. In fact, it has been precisely through the difficulties in which god has acted to work in us. Since this is my testimony, I'll stick to my side of the transaction. What I discovered is the pure supernatural power of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to take habits, impulses, and strongholds of the flesh, and turn them into the pure power of agape through the power of the Holy Spirit. Pressures, demands, faults which are a chronic source of conflict in the flesh, become occasions of growth and of pure joy. the first time this happened, I had an image of Dave and I on a collision course, and, through the Power of the Spirit, completely defying the Laws of Newtonian Physics. Instead of a collision, the best way I could describe it is to say that it appeared that we were two solid objects which had completely passed through each other. I found that habits, attitudes, and actions which could lead to conflict became, instead, the occasion for the Holy Spirit to lead both of us deeper into the Life of the Spirit and into the Heart of God. The key action, of course, in this transformation, is prayer, for it is through prayer, coming into the presence of God through the Name of His Son Jesus, that the Father is free to pour His Spirit in vessels which have been cleansed of self and are ready to receive His Holy Spirit.

This is a very brief account of a lot of work, but its brevity also shows the ease of confronting every evil, destroying every stronghold of the enemy, and overcoming every opposition in the world to the will of God. This Victory is not accomplished through the power of Self. In fact, the power of Self could only have caused disaster in each opportunity which the Holy Spirit turned to God through the Cross of Jesus, and through His Resurrection. It is my hope that this all too brief account will encourage you and lead you to the only God of the Universe, to the Love and Salvation of His Son, Jesus, the Annointed One, and to the Power of living through His Holy Spirit. Amen.