We Use the Wrong Bait

This weekend, I visited North Carolina State University (which I thought was the University of North Carolina) and did street healing with a group of Christians. Our outing was a success. No one we worked on failed to receive a healing.

This morning, I was thinking about our experience, and I drifted off and imagined myself talking to a young university student about God. I didn’t really get to speak this weekend. This morning, I heard myself telling her the things I wish young people knew about God.

Jesus visited me twice. On the first occasion, the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the way it felt to be near him. I knew everything was going to be all right, no matter what. I felt his love radiating toward me. The second time, I felt these things again. I felt his love in my heart, mind, and body. My body felt a warm sensation, as though Jesus were a fireplace and I were sitting in front of him.

I imagined myself telling a college student this, and I started thinking it was too bad Jesus wasn’t there so she could feel it firsthand.

When I had that thought, something occurred to me. I’m supposed to be like Jesus. I should not have to get him to come down and visit in order for someone to feel his love physically. They should feel it emanating from me.

That was sobering. Christians always say we’re supposed to be little replicas of Jesus, and we do what we think he would do, including working miracles, but who is out there pouring supernatural love out so strongly other people can feel it in their bodies? Nobody. Maybe someone is doing it, but I have never heard anything about it.

For years, I’ve believed I was supposed to radiate love other people could feel, and I prayed for it, but somehow this morning I started to feel much more serious about it.

The secular world loves to accuse us. They love saying we’re full of hate. It’s not hard to find angry Christians (or to torment us until we become angry so we can be used as visual aids), so unbelievers look for Christians who are not exactly radiating love, and they give them a lot of publicity.

Christians are doing wonderful things all over the world, but unbelievers don’t like to let the news get out. We heal people. Many have raised the dead. I just met a lady who has adopted 15 kids and given them a home and a family. These things are not unusual, but they’re not what you see when you turn on the news. You’re more likely to see the Westboro Baptist Church, which is so small it can fit in three vans, waving signs that say, “God hates fags.”

Worldly people can find all sorts of angry Christians to publicize, and they avoid shining a light on Christians who do good. Many unbelievers think of us as rage-filled potential terrorists who need to be stamped out. Maybe it would be different if it were common for a Christian to get on a bus and overwhelm everyone he walked past with the sensation of radiant love. Maybe it would never make the TV news, but at least it would impact the people we met and show them they were wrong about us and about God.

God can drop supernatural love into you. It has happened to me on a number of occasions. It’s a strange thing. It makes your face feel warm. You stop thinking about the ways other people provoke you. You feel affection for them. It happens, but in my case, it has been a fleeting thing.

It has happened to me a few times during the last few weeks. It happened while I was driving home from North Carolina. I try to hold onto it. I try not to let anything that works against it enter my mind.

These days, I tell God I love him. I tell him over and over. I do love him, but sometimes other things occupy my mind, and I don’t feel it. I have learned to think about and remember my feelings for him. It seems to help a great deal.

When it comes to other people, I say I love them. I make a point of doing this with people who are annoying and hateful. I don’t say it out loud, and I don’t go see them so I can say it in their presence, but I say it, even when I don’t feel it at first.

I suppose these are tools God has given me to get unblocked and get the love flowing.

Is it a lie to say you love someone who gets on your nerves, when you don’t feel it at first? Not if it changes the way you feel and becomes true.

A big benefit of supernatural love is that it kills worry and fear. I do not like worry and fear. Dropping my petty grievances seems like a small price to pay for freedom.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the kind of love strangers can feel just because I’m nearby, but I want anything I can get.

I cringe when I see Christians promoting debate. I hate the very idea of little cards and pamphlets that help you “win” arguments with unbelievers. No one comes to God because he lost an argument! Christianity is supernatural, and people are won over supernaturally. They need to see supernatural power, and they need to feel supernatural love. Take away someone’s physical illness and make him feel the heat of God’s love, and he will know his arguments are garbage and that he has been missing out.

Argument is carnal and ineffective. There will always be a way to use logic against belief. There will always be an anti-faith argument that looks really good. On top of that, human beings believe what they want, not what the facts tell them. You have to present them with something they want.

This was on my mind this morning, and I thought it was important enough to write about.