His Love Frees

I guess we can all have experiences that are very hard to put into words. As followers of Jesus, we are mindful that the world looks for opportunities to mock us. That’s certainly the apprehension I feel in deciding to write down an event that happened to me at Nicholaston burrows one day. I know an atheist would interpret the circumstances as a mere fortuity: a cloud raining on a man sitting on a sand dune. So, what? Those are the basic facts and yet the finer details were far too divinely orchestrated to be a coincidence. The timing of it all shocked me, like a sublime musical composition, orchestrated by a master.  

This is what happened and you can either be encouraged by it or scoff at it. For me personally, it was a touch from the father of the heavenly lights, both terrifying and thrilling me. So this is the account of it – it happened a few years ago at Nicholaston, as I’ve already written: a beautiful, partly hidden beach with sandy dunes on the southern side of the Gower peninsula near Swansea in Wales. I needed a walk and headed through woodland until I reached the cusp of a dune hill. There were no clouds in the sky and the weather was pleasant. 

I felt very tired and sat down on top of a dune to pray, facing the sea. I didn’t really want to have ‘a prayer time’ with ‘a prayer list.’ I just wanted to speak raw to Jesus, from the heart. Me naked, in a sense, telling him my inner core. Saying to God that I valued him simply for himself. I just wanted him to know that he is special.

I spoke out the words: “I love you, Jesus.”

The precise moment I pronounced the ‘s’ in Jesus, and I do mean to the millisecond, I felt a rapid-fire of cold rain collapsing onto my head from a small cloud, exactly above where I was sitting. It appeared out of nowhere. My breath was violently knocked out of me by the power of the water. I was machine gunned by the deluge as I leapt up like a startled rabbit and ran for my life, terrified at the sudden sense of the divine presence. As CS Lewis wrote [yes, I know too many Christians quote him!], God is not a tame lion. I experienced it at that moment. A ferocious response to the genuine murmur of love from my heart.    

I stood from a distance and felt both exhilarated and genuinely frightened, and then annoyed with myself for running away so quickly. God had shown his hand and I bolted away from him! No one really expects the Lord to be that real, do they? I mean we appreciate the ‘still, small quiet voice of God’ and that is how he guides us, through his words. But I wonder how many Christians, and definitely ‘non Christians’, actually understand that the God of the Bible is not a dinosaur but very much alive and purposeful.  

Jesus is personally known to us but I learnt a lesson that day. Firstly, God appreciates prayers from the heart. He loves the intimacy of walking with us as much as we enjoy walking with him. Secondly, the creator of the Universe is wild and he is so very beautiful. 

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