On a hot and humid August day, 2011, while working at my part-time job, an accounts person at our office was on the phone with another accounts person about 40 miles away. They both shouted at once, “What was that?” Realizing they were both feeling the same ground trembling at the same time, so distant from one another, brought them to panic. What was happening? (there may, or may not, have been wild screaming involved). Minutes later, and unaware of the excitement back at the office, when I rang the doorbell at my next customer’s home, I was greeted by a wide-eyed, wheelchair-bound, lady who was desperately attempting to remove all the artwork from her walls lest they be destroyed upon crashing to the floor. Confused, and thinking she might be in need of medical attention, I did my best to reassure her that all was well. She kept asking if I’d felt it too. I was unsure of what the ‘it’ was, so I helped her take down several more pieces of framed art. Was there anyone she could call? Yes. Her sister. Somewhat reassured myself, I left, wondering what that was all about. Arriving back at our office, I heard the wild phone call story and learned that there had been an earthquake. Since, at the time of the quake, I’d been on the highway in a work van, I hadn’t felt a thing.
This story, I think, illustrates a truth about our lives post-Pentecost. Our God has a phenomenal work to accomplish – the salvation/adoption of over 8,000,000,000 souls. That’s why, when Scripture tells us He never slumbers nor sleeps, we can understand the ‘why’ a bit better. There remain languages into which to translate His love. There are cultures to penetrate. There are works of the enemy to destroy. There are His already-adopted kids to mature to the point they are prepared to ‘go’ as Jesus originally commissioned. There is a massive work to do, tearing down walls of division and establishing sacred unity in His Body.
Ephesians 2:10, TPT, says: “We have become His poetry, a re-created people that will fulfil the destiny He has given each of us, for we are joined to Jesus, the Anointed One.” There is, as I imagine it, a perpetual ‘earthquake’ as the Kingdom rumbles forward inexorably, shaking the ground of our Pentecosted souls with the Holy Spirit’s seismic activity. As to our ‘missing’ the shaking, it isn’t that God is off on holiday with the Holy Spirit, but that we can live busily getting from place to place, inattentive to holy goings on. Yikes! PD
