God has been talking to people, random people, not church people, not people who have been searching for God and asking questions. Just out of the blue, telling them to read their bible or to prayer. God just turning up. This is a nationwide phenomenon as well as being experienced locally. People somehow feeling God is near them. Maybe you have experienced it.
Some reports are of a quite revival among young people, but it is more than that. It has gone across all age ranges and has touched all manner of souls. It seems that it has bypassed the Church, that ‘the normal route’ for finding God has been sidelined and the direct approach has been taken by God speaking into the hearts and lives of individual.
How this encounter with the divine is taken forward is up to you. If you are reading your bible and want to understand it more, come and have a chat; if it is finding out more about the community of God come and join others who are on the same journey (we all have more to learn). God does seem to be doing a new thing here.
And yet it was the same on the day of resurrection. They had seen Jesus killed and put, dead, into a tomb. Now they were coming to do what was right for a dead body and they met the risen Jesus. John records it like this, talking about Mary Magalene, ‘…. she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ 16 Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew,[b] ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).
The penny dropped, expectations blown apart, new things now possible.
We can meet the risen Jesus today. We can search him out, or maybe he will search us out and come unexpectedly and begin to speak to you.
Nick
Team Vicar