Subtitle: Jesus declared, “A new commandment I give to you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”

Excerpt: Jesus declared, “A new commandment I give to you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”

Author: Derek Hastings

I was reminded of the ways God has intersected my life with His Kingdom reality. I will admit that looking back at these events in my wife’s and my life is a favorite thing my mind goes to when I need a reminder of how close He is to me and how much He loves me.

These are the waypoints of my life, which have fed my imagination with the idea that God sometimes interrupts our lives just because He wants to. No agenda (except maybe my growth as His child), no specific prayer important enough for Him to respond. Although in my case, He may be responding to a prayer I prayed years ago, which I would be baffled to remember.

The purpose of this article is to convey the wonderful joy that comes when He shows up unannounced. It is not intended to convince anyone who considers either side of the Gifts or no Gifts controversy. I want to describe the reality of the miraculous events in my life and what they have meant to me.

This wall of controversy has created an atmosphere of distrust between brothers and sisters in the faith.

I have a good relationship with a pastor who leads our city-wide 7 AM prayer time. Great guy, exemplary Bible scholar. During prayer, sometimes I use one of my life events to add to a discussion, and the look of fear on the pastor’s face has become a marker for me that I have crossed a line for him. He is swift to add all kinds of qualifiers to my experience.

If any of you have read my stories, where I have used certain events like this to illustrate a subject, you might recognize some of these.

I had no religious experience growing up. My parents were violently against religion of any form. So I just never went there. I led a secular life up to and after college. Then my life (and my concept of what life was supposed to be) fell apart. I was drifting downhill with no clue about what life held.

The first incident that I would qualify as a supernatural event was before I became a Christian. I got married probably around 1976. And, the night of the reception, a good friend was abandoned by her boyfriend and had nowhere to go. So I invited her to sleep at our apartment, which didn’t go over well with my wife on our wedding night. That friend is now my wife. In essence, on my first wedding night, I was fighting with my new wife, while my second wife slept in the other room.

My first wife divorced me about a year later with no explanation.

I am sure that other than being an incredible coincidence, there are a few of you who might agree with me that there was a message there.

The next miracle was being resurrected from spiritual death to life as the New Creation. I won’t describe that one.

Next would be my actual wedding ceremony. Both my wife and I agree that when we received communion, we felt as though we were floating, and we both experienced a powerful infilling of the Holy Spirit. We had multiple people approach us and ask what was going on up there. We couldn’t put it into words.

Next is an event that changed my entire perspective on the world, which I have written about before. Here’s a link to that post. Essentially, in a very desperate situation, I was saved by my guardian angel, who specifically identified himself by telling me to read Psalm 91:11, and I would see why he was there for me. I had no clue what he was talking about. My wife had to explain to me what all of that meant.

We started our family, and began a stretch where my wife was afflicted with a chronic disease, and I couldn’t understand why God didn’t heal her. I had all kinds of people praying for her. But she is still burdened by this disease.

The next most incredible event was when my daughter and I were at a Father-Daughter campout on a private beach north of Fort Bragg, California. I was going through a desperate few years of praying for her healing. I was becoming increasingly upset with God, even though I had not vocalized that before. At the campfire the first night, the pastor said that if anything was bothering us, we should go down to the beach in the middle of the night and let it all out.

So I did. I ended up screaming at God, using every profanity I had in my prodigious ex-sailor vocabulary. I raged for quite a while until I felt a hand on my head that pushed me down to the sand and held me there, and a peace came over me like I had never felt since coming to Him. I didn’t notice at first, but I was babbling nonsense. It took me a few seconds before I realized what was going on. I was speaking in tongues.

Speaking in tongues for me was one of the few things about being a believer that I couldn’t tolerate. I had had too many bad and weird things happen in my short New Life to want to have anything to do with tongues. Still, as I lay there on the sand, I felt the anger leave, and as I continued to talk, the peace kept getting stronger.

Back at church, I enthusiastically thought that everyone would be excited about this. I eagerly tried to share this with one of the Elders who was a mentor to me. His face went blank, and he turned and walked away, never speaking to me again. It was at that point that I realized not everyone would be accepting of this. In some situations, they would be angry with me.

This last one is, perhaps, a bit scripturally questionable, I admit. And, I have read and studied all the commentaries and debates (which are mostly context-defining for just that jailer).

During an early morning prayer time, I was emotionally distraught over the fact that my father had just passed away without my knowledge, never finding Jesus. The verse in Acts 16:31 came to mind, and I began to pray that if this could happen, then perhaps God would do the same for me. Later that morning, I was on my morning prayer walk, and I decided to take a different route. I ran into one of those people who hold signs on the side of the road. His sign was Acts 16:31. I have the pictures to prove it.

There are many more examples of how the Lord has interrupted my life. I have asked myself what significance these events hold, and the only answer I can find is that God is expressing His love to me.

The only truly prophetic experience I have had occurred a couple of years ago. It came in the form of an extraordinarily vivid and gripping dream. This dream woke me up, and I spent many days praying about the significance of the dream. I also asked several of my pastor friends about it, and they all agreed that it was genuinely from God.

In conclusion, I ask that we, as brothers and sisters, give each other grace with our differing opinions and stands on these kinds of personal experiences.

To my strict Bible scholars who automatically write off these experiences, please check to see if that individual has sought out his pastor’s advice and done the proper comparison to Scripture before judging this person as a nut.

To those of us who have these experiences that cause controversy, please be diligent in seeking wisdom about them before sharing them over social media as something exciting. Seek counsel. After all, that is what your pastor is there for. Be careful and sensitive to those who have never experienced the supernatural side of life with Jesus.