The Unexpected Hand of God

Advent is a great time to float those impossible prayers out there.  The entire Christmas story is one big impossible expression of hope fulfilled, the proverbial victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, so why not pray big in a season like this?  As I grow older my prayers tend to be much more focused, give me an outlet for what you have gifted me to be.  A pastor without a church is not a pastor at all, and I wrestle with what God has made me to be without giving me an opportunity to express it.  Now this is not about pastoring, but it is about feeling the hand of God, and, more specifically, feeling the hand of God with no idea as to what it means.  But I had to record this thought before I lost it forever.

A little background.  There are always individuals in every church that are always on the fringes...you know the type.  They are the dancers, and exhuberant praisers, and faith confessors, and ardent prayers, and mountain-moving believers.  And while a lot of people may write them off as extreme, there is just something about them that makes me know that they have seen the face of God, and routinely find themselves in His presence, and so when they speak, I listen.

And that's where this account finally gels together.  The scene:  Second Sunday of Advent, pre-service praise music, finishing a cup of coffee in the back pew and trying to get my thoughts in a somewhat ready order.  Praise group is singing a song that I don't recognize, one of those generic songs naming all of the great qualities of Jesus and what He has done.  And as they sing this one particular line "through you the dead will raise", the hand of God, or more accurately the hand of our resident God-seeker, lands on my shoulder and more or less says "that is you."  So that's it.  I do not have a clue what it means, and I was frankly scared to ask for much of anything more in the way of explanation.  It is worth recording because it does not happen that often, but I have come to expect great things from this season.  This is one of those "thin" times, when the barrier between heaven and earth gets gauze-like thin and miracles still happen.