The Holy Spirit Day

This is the day that is the highlight of the whole course. It is the day that makes all the difference and is considered the most important. From day one everyone has said this is the day of excitement and is just a personal special day so I have come into the day full of excitement, a little bit of nerves and an incredible amount of curiosity.

The day has taken the same format as most of the other evenings during the course apart from the fact there are four videos shown during the day (Intro + 3 more) and a distinct change in mood around the course (I’ll get to this later)

Anyway all seemed ‘normal’ for a while, first video and a bit of a chat and about 4 cups of tea after Nicky has explained the idea of “Who is the Holy Spirit?” Personally I felt the video was a bit long and got off the topic of who the Holy Spirit was and much more into the content of the two videos that were to be done later in the day. Nothing unusual seemed to be occurring at this point and in fact all was just exactly as normal. Anyway 20 minutes later we had another video to watch. At this point I have to be honest I am feeling video’d out. We’d have 90 minutes of video in a short space of time. That was just too much information for me to take in. I needed time to process the first one before moving onto the second one but that is just me.

Anyway we then moved onto lunch which was wonderful. There was the most amazing spread of food at lunchtime and it was just fantastic, jacket potatoes, quiche, tuna, garlic bread, an amazing salad, crisps, cake in a wonderful environment and I even went outside and said hello to the chickens. Afterwards we then all went for a walk and I had a chat with someone whilst we were going who was immensely encouraging but (and I don’t mean this in a bad way) wanted me to come to faith today. The belief of the people around me is something else to behold. It is truly amazing the level of faith they have. I can only stand and watch in awe at it. The problem for someone like me, it was really intimidating (yes I do get intimidated!) and that you could feel a massive sense of expectation from everyone around that today was going to be the day. The thing I realised during the videos was that there was so much information and no time to process is that there was no way it could be the day. All I could feel though as the afternoon drew on was more pressure to make a commitment to God because all these people wanted “the best” for me.

Anyway we then went back in and watched video number 3 which was how can I be filled with the Holy Spirit, and I have to say just ended up completely and utterly confused. The “How can I filled with the Holy spirit?” DVD was more about “What does the Holy Spirit do?” that about its own topic. This catapulted me over the edge and we sat around talking about it afterwards and from where I was that is what I really wanted to do was talk about these things but I felt like it was time to make a choice. Do I commit or not? I knew at that point it wasn’t the right time but felt this enormous amount of pressure to decide. It was to be honest the worst amount of pressure I have ever felt about anything in my life and I can ‘t make life changing decisions under that sort of pressure.  So we all prayed together and went our separate ways. Afterwards some of us had a cup of tea together.. yes another one :0 and had a chat about the day and just found it really intense and really difficult.

When I went home and got home that is when it really started to affect me. All of a sudden a lot of my view seemed to change about a lot of things. Is this course a bums on seats exercise? Is this to try to get more people to come to church or to allow more people to explore this and make up their own mind. It really threw me into complete turmoil. Anyway I decided on Saturday night I needed a break from the whole thing so didn’t really talk about it a great deal but was feeling pretty upset inside at the whole thing that had taken place. The Holy Spirit day really didn’t do anything to help me on my journey and in fact I think it has caused me an awful lot of problems which I am going to be trying to work through over the coming days and weeks. The impact of that feeling of pressure on me has been severe and has really rattled everything that has been done over the past few weeks. In fact I feel like I have taken so many steps backwards yesterday I don’t feel like I did before I started. A lot of the curiosity has been taken out of me. I even feel at times as if I could just turn my back on the whole thing and walk away. I just feel that dreadful about what happened. There was so much to do in too short a period of time with no real opportunity for reflection or anything else that it just got too intense. I know that people want to see us “succeed” which equals coming to God but I honestly thought that everything would be in its own time at its own pace and comfortable. I never imagined it would be like it was on Saturday. I can safely say that I have gone to bed on Saturday night with the deliberate thought of avoiding thinking about it.

This entry is not to blame anybody for what happened on Saturday, it is just me describing how I feel. I hope nobody feels offended because I don't mean them too, I just don't feel good about it right now.