Had a most amazing conversation today… one that has left me smiling ever since…
Went to Hungry Jacks with the Misses 5 and 14 to kill some time. The only other person sitting by the playground was an older chap who looked something like a 60’s rocker or biker – and a small boy. He was trying to get the little bloke to eat his food while it was warm so I commented about play being the top priority of a 4yo. He unfolded his arms and I noticed the ‘homemade’ tatts on his fingers and I thought to myself “this man has a story”. Our little people got along well, and Miss 14 went inside to get me a coffee. He commented to me that he’d watched something about Nostradamus the night before and a little part of me groaned on the inside… I didn’t want to have an ooh-ahh conversation about Nostradamus. Thinking to myself that a prophet is only a true prophet if they are 100% right 100% of the time, I decided to deflect him by making light of it… asking him if he’d seen the cartoon about the Mayan calendar that runs out of space… he had a laugh and I was pleased to have brought that to a dead end…
After a while he asked if my two girls were my only children and when I answered no, 7, he laughed and said we must have taken the Good Book’s words to “go forth and populate – seriously”. I asked if the boy was his son or grandson – it was his grandson – they were in town from the country, his wife was shopping and he had some time to kill waiting to pick up a granddaughter and head home. He then said they’d had 4 children but that they’d lost their second son when he was only 4 1/2. I asked him how long it had taken for them to be able to breathe again after losing their son. I wondered if he wouldn’t want to talk about it, but thought since he’d opened the subject, that he might. Well, that was the beginning.
He said if it wasn’t for the Creator he wouldn’t even be alive. That his boy had been born at 5.45 on a Friday night, and had died at 5.45 on a Friday night, 4 ½ years later, 27 years ago. That he’d been out ‘doing business that wasn’t good business’ when he crossed paths with an ambulance and he just ‘knew’. He’d then held his boy in his arms and SCREAMED out that if God was real, to SHOW him and he’d read His book every day if He would just SHOW him He was real.
I am always amazed and yet not, that God shows Himself when we scream out for Him in this most primal, guttural, empty of everything – kind of way.
The day after the funeral, he and his wife went to the cemetery. AS they walked in, BOTH of them had been completely filled up with a peace… he said it felt like they’d been given their son back but what it was – was instead a peace about WHERE the boy was. He’d agonised… was there life after death, where WAS his boy, and when they went to the cemetery, Yah (God) let them know he was with Him. Amazing flooding peace.
And then he said, began the cleansing.
This was when I became certain, that he was for real. A true encounter with God (Yah ) doesn’t begin and end with a mystical moment. It’s the beginning of a lifelong walk. A relationship. A continuing revelation of our need for and availability to – His pure waters of cleansing.
All that was in the first 10 minutes.
Over the next hour I told him how, having grown up in a Christian home and kinda being ‘secure’ in having been ‘good’, it took me till somewhere in my late 30’s to really realise in my guts, that I was a sinner. We spoke of how the Tabernacle is a model (not only of the heavenlies) but of how we come to Him. That we come first to the alter (the cross) and then to the laver where we are cleansed time and again through our whole life long.
I asked him how he came to know God as Yah, Yahweh – and Yeshua and we spoke of the Hebraic origins of the faith. He grinned when I knew what he meant by the Ruach HaKodesh (the Holy Spirit) and we flowed in and out of personal story, Scripture and awe.
He’d been a Pastor, but was no longer… he’d kept his promise to Yah, and read His Book every day. Even pointing to it sitting on the dashboard of his car. The proof was in his speech as he knew what was in passages I mentioned and the references for the words that I mentioned. Just so LOVE when a person’s LOVE of the Word just can’t be contained! We spoke too of being viewed as a nutter. A legalist. Of having gone over the limit. Of the hidden treasures and joys in the Torah. The feasts. His Name. His cleansing. His Spirit.
He brought his grandson to his knee and told Him this lady here knew Yeshua (Jesus) too. And then we prayed. Right there in Hungry Jacks. Sibling strangers being Church. He prayed blessing on me and my family, and I already knew that I was. Blessed that is. Still smiling.