Looking for Lightning

       I am 21 now, and that feels weird to say because I’m growing up, and life is changing at a pace more rapid than I’ve ever seen it, which has required some adaptation and resilience, but mainly just a lot of faith. Thankfully, the God I serve, by “the integrity of His heart,” and with “the skilfulness of his Hands,” has taught me how to trust Him, taking my ashes of doubt and fear and trading them for the beauty of faith (Psalms 78:72). I’ve been sanctified for 4 years now, and in that time, God has been my only true constant. God forgave me of my sins on July 4th, 2018, and on that day, God gave me liberty that extends so fervently to me still, liberty that was prophesied about and manifested to us long before 1776. God sanctified me on July 6th, 2018, and on that day, God gave me the fire of the Holy Ghost, a burning torch that lights the way on a path that I can’t see.

       In those first couple of weeks after becoming sanctified, right before Campmeeting, I remember struggling with doubt, with what seemed at the time to be a lack of a witness of salvation. ‘Did I really get sanctified?’ the devil had me asking myself. I had given my all to God, but I just couldn’t seem to know, I didn’t know how to know, really. I didn’t know why I felt the way I did, but I knew I needed to feel God fully in my life, and I couldn’t do that if I was filled with doubts about my sanctification. I remember driving home one night in my dad’s truck, so sick of doubting. I was begging God, pleading for something. Something I could hold onto. A witness that expelled all doubt, but that was just so elusive to me at the time. I likened the kind of witness I wanted and the one I was looking for to a lightning bolt, not a literal one, but one of feeling or emotion, of some grand experience that was undeniable and irrefutable, the same way a bolt of electricity would be if it struck the pavement right in front of me with a bright light and a booming crash, too obvious to doubt. So, crying in the car, sitting at a stoplight, I asked, “what more do you want from me?” My thinking at the time was if I had given my all to God, why did He seem to be so quiet? Why did He seem to be holding back an answer? I had laid it all on the altar, so with nothing else to give, I wondered why God hadn’t made Himself so explicitly plain to me in the way that He sent His salvation. I asked Him this, and immediately, God spoke to me in a way that I can’t explain, but in a way that I knew – “your faith,” that’s what more He wanted from me. My witness was not in seeing a big flash of light, or hearing a crashing boom of thunder, but in believing that God will reach down to a sinner, with nothing to offer, extending an amount of love and mercy that I still can’t quite comprehend, and sanctify him fully, entirely eradicating sin and granting the miracle of living a Holy life. I never saw any blinding flash or heard any deafening thunder that night. That’s not how God worked with me. However, in that time since, I have certainly come to see, and I have certainly come to hear, the fullness of Christ, expressly, explicitly, and so plainly manifested right in front of me. On the coffee table my knees rested against as I read through Hebrews one night, a golden glow pulsing through the pages, on the pavement and glittering off my windshield as I drove down the road listening to “Wonderful Story of Love,” in my gilded tomorrows, as I read the stories of hope presented in the scriptures and watch them come alive as if they were my own.

       That experience happened during the summer before my senior year of high school. Today, life is drastically different than it was then, and it’s changed even more with every year that’s passed. Since then, I’ve thought about that lightning bolt, for other things in my life, how easy it could be if the choices I have yet to make, of what to do and where to go and how to do it all, were as plain as a strike of electricity, visible and clear. Instead, I’ve experienced a different element, one that’s been demonstrated so powerfully to me, in my brightest moments, and in my darkest nights: fire, the blazing flame of the Holy Ghost. John the Baptist said, “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me… shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire” (Matthew 3:11). There’s a lot of importance surrounding the symbolism of water in the scriptures, but Jesus didn’t come to baptize with water, and he didn’t come to electrify, either. He came to baptize with the all-consuming flame, a Holy fire that ignites me to go further, that drives me to chase the passion of the scriptures, that urges me to carry that torch into a world of darkness, a task I certainly don’t feel qualified for. There’s a lot of things still to figure out in life that I don’t feel qualified for, and not a lot of knowledge of myself to figure it all out, but God required my faith four years ago, not in seeing a bolt of lightning, but through believing in His great light, and He requires it today, too. I see that great light, that fulness of Christ, in the beauty of the gospel and how it permeates into every crevice of my life, in the love of sanctified folks, in the magic of the scriptures and how they unfold themselves to me, in the love that God allows me to have for other people, in the way I’m able to feel the hope, traded from ashes, that strikes through the fog of fear or doubt or anxiety or sadness or despair or whatever it may possibly be, to reveal that great light, prophesied about in Isaiah, manifested to me four years ago, and even more brightly ever since. So, I never got that bright lightning bolt, but the way that God spoke to me was so much sweeter, and I did indeed, and still do, see a great light.

“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

• Bro Ryan Collier