A Readiness to Hear

It wasn’t until I entered into a relationship with Giselle, that I knew what it meant to know and feel and experience love. And it’s taken me a while to rest into this relationship as well.

Some eighteen years ago, when I started to attend a certain church in Brisbane, I was introduced to a message by a man named Leonard Evans. The name of that message was called the “Love Commandment”. I remember listening to this message a few times, and felt that it somehow gave me a perspective of God that helped me to journey through some of the times ahead. I remember feeling the “safety” of this message as I went through Bible College at a College that was “radical” in its teachings of the Holy Spirit. And when I say radical, I mean radical for me. After all, I can only talk of the context within which I found myself.

I suppose in an ironic sense, back in those times, I don’t ever believe that I truly digested everything fully in that message. (And neither did the church that I was attending either. It seemed that people were content with just a vaguely familiar understanding as opposed to a deep context of experience) Neither did I put it totally into practice in my life. In fact, I think I only knew it in my head, and really felt little of it through my experience. It’s not that I wanted it to be that way, but it was more like just “one of those things I was going to do one day”. One day I would allow myself to be changed by this message, by what God was saying to me through this message. One day was easy. It was enough for me at that time, though, to just think upon that message as a “break glass” kind of message. The church that I attended at the time was Pentecostal. And sometimes I would see “things” that kinda troubled me, or confused me. Other times I saw things that I just really didn’t like. And just like a little security blanket, I would go back to that message in my mind, and know that everything was going to be okay. I guess it was a grounding for me; an anchor or a keel.

Through the years, that same message, possibly a seed, was something that I went back to from time to time. It was something that helped me understand I guess who God was. Fast forward many years to last week, and I found myself, for reasons I can only attribute to God. Who can say why memories that have been buried for years surface again? It’s at those times, that I sit quietly and wonder if there isn’t something that I should be seeing or hearing, a message from God.

So that message jumped into my conscious last week. I remembered his name. So I googled him and didn’t find much. Then I googled again, and found something more. After a little digging, I came across the original recordings of the messages that Len Evans gave in Australia way back in 1977. So I have been listening to those messages, and letting them go further in than they ever did before.