Seeing Into the Realm of Spirit

From the first night in my first apartment I was aware of a man’s spirit entering the front door and walking up the stairs and into the kitchen. I never saw him, but I sensed and heard him at the same time every night. I didn’t want to alarm my roommate, so I didn’t mention it to her. After some months of this, she and I were both home when he came in and I looked at her to see if she also was aware of him, and she confirmed she was. We agreed that he seemed harmless and never varied his routine or tried to interfere in our lives in any way, so we all just went on about our particular business.

I had similar spirit company in the next eight apartments in which I lived. Sometimes I would see them, sometimes just hear them, sometimes just sense their moving presence.

At one place it was benevolent, playful balls of light shooting around near the baseboard from one room to another. Again, both my roommate and I saw them. That group left when my roommate moved out, following him to his new apartment.

More often than not the malevolent spirits would show up whenever I was close to making a decision that would seriously compromise my ethics (read: sin). I would sense, and sometime see, them climbing my back fence or trying to break into my apartment. Those spirits would disappear the moment I rejected the choice that was being pressed upon me, having finally recognized the danger lying in wait for me therein.

Once it was a malevolent male spirit in ragged clothes out to do me specific, personal harm, unrelated to any choices I would or could make.

Once it was an angel trying to let me know a friend of mine was in spiritual danger and needed me. The angel’s presence was so strong I was paralyzed in my bed with what felt like a sheet of electricity charging through my body until she left the room.

All of these encounters and more occurred before I was “born again” and “filled with the Spirit.” However, in addition to these “sensings,” there is a multitude of evidence in my life that the Holy Spirit and my ministering angels were hard at work preserving my life until such time as I could be “saved,” and the Holy Spirit live and work from within me:

* Multiple drives down black-ice covered mountain roads with dangerous switchbacks,
* Antelope that suddenly leaped from invisibility in the barrow-pit and turned away from my headlamps to run off, rather than running in front of them,
* Tumbles as I walked with my arms loaded with hard-edged books and fell not onto the bone-crushing cement below me, but sank and sank and sank into the fluffiest of clouds in slow motion until I simply ceased to fall, without a scratch to me or my books.

Oddly enough, I have become much less S(s)spirit-conscious since the Holy Spirit entered my life more directly.

I am no longer so readily aware of the lost or malevolent spirits around me -- which now makes it more difficult for me to determine whether what is not working in my life is due to my flesh or to those invisible spirits.

I am aware of the many, perfectly timed, gentle giftings the Holy Spirit delivers and I thank Him always at the moment of their arrival:

* A wig when I needed it as I was beginning to seriously lose my hair during chemo,
* A book gifted to me at the perfect time to help me through a difficult passage,
* Free clothes to fit a swiftly altered body,
* The timely locating for me of lost keys, shoes, notes . . . at my request.

But I am not nearly as aware as I want to be of the presence of the Holy Spirit within me -- which lack of awareness deprives me of much of His companionship, much of His comfort, much of His wisdom, much of His knowledge, and much of His grace. How much more wonderful would it be to “sense” His company? Not just in my apartments. But everywhere I go and am.

The good news is, with a small amount of consistent, persistent effort, I can easily become just as, if not more, aware of the Holy Spirit’s presence within me as I was of those wandering spirits in my apartments.

All I need to do is spend daily time in God’s Word with the clear intention of fellowshipping with Him through His Holy Spirit, asking as I read for the Holy Spirit to reveal to me “that which is hidden” and to guide my steps throughout my day.

Then I need to practice listening throughout my day for His guidance, which He provides to me through His inward voice (the still small voice), His inward witness (when He checks my spirit at the beginning of every wrong move or lifts it at every right one), the arrangement of serendipitous circumstances in my life, and His supe
atural works of prophecy, tongues, words of wisdom, words of knowledge, healing manifestations, His audible voice, and other divine works.

If I will do this consistently and persistently enough, eventually I will “sense” His presence with and within me continuously throughout my waking and my sleeping, my comings and my goings, my ups and my downs, day by day by day, until we meet in heavenly grace, face to face to face.