So I worked on my insurance policy. I went to all the meetings, I studied my Bible and lifted up my hands in worship to God, hoping that this would be enough to persuade Him that I really was good, that I was on His side.
When, two years after that first demonic encounter, Peter Cabot invited us to be baptised in the Holy Spirit, I knew this was my moment to notch up some spiritual fortification. I would have the secret language of God: the groans of the Spirit, which St Paul says is God praying within us. Then I would have proof that I really did belong to Christ and wasn’t going to end up in hell.
Mum had told me that beginning to pray in tongues felt strange because you have to just open your mouth and start. “It’s like learning a new language, with new sounds and noises.” And now, here at the front of the Power Pack tent, Peter Cabot told us to do the same. “You’ve got faith to ask for the Holy Spirit to come and overpower you, now you need to have faith to open your mouth and start speaking in the power of that Spirit.”
At school I wasn’t very good at languages, but at least there was a textbook answer for how the words ought to sound. Now there was nothing except the hum of children beginning to make their first faltering sounds in the language of God’s Spirit and the promise of a more exhilarating fluency than I would ever achieve in French lessons. It wasn’t exactly a textbook but the thought of the words my Mum said when praying in tongues was enough to give me something to start with. And so it began: these higgledy-piggledy sounds spilling from my mouth in a language that sounded too odd and disappointing to be the sound of God speaking through me.
It happened to each of us that day. Julia, Charlie, me and Katie pouring out of the Power Pack marquee with everyone else, excited by the buzz of having newly received God’s power, laughing about the funny sounds we made, sometimes unsure of whether we had actually prayed in tongues or whether we had slipped into mere imitation of our parents. “I’m sure I was saying ‘Shall-I-buy-a-Honda’ at one stage”, shrieked Julia, recalling the phrase that we had always used when impersonating praying grown-ups at church.
So when, that evening, Hannah found out that we were all changed, filled with the Spirit and spouting tongues in New Testament style, she begged us for a recitation. None of us were prepared to perform for Hannah, Joel and Anthony – the three who had skived off the morning meeting – and their pestering soon gave way to frustrated resentment.
Now there was a divide: those who had and those who had not. Those who spoke in tongues and those who didn’t. Perhaps that’s where it began to turn sour. Perhaps even in a Bible camp the fear of being left out leaves a kid ready to lash out in any way they can to even the score.
“Go on, just say a few words.” Anthony turned to me.
“I’m not going to …”
“Why not?” he persisted.
“It’s meant to be prayer, not a performance. Anyway you can hear people speaking in tongues in the meeting tomorrow.”
“But I want to hear you …”
“Why me?”
He grinned and settled his gaze on my mouth.
“I want to hear if tongues are easier for you to get your teeth around than English.”
Katie flushed, her smile at the banter turning to embarrassment at what Anthony was getting at.
This was the kind of moment I needed Charlie’s sharp tongue, but he was busy flirting with Hannah.
Only Julia pushed him. “What did you say to her?”
Anthony with his cocky half-smile didn’t bother to repeat what he’d said. He just took aim once more.
“I just wondered if her teeth get in the way when she speaks in tongues …” His voice trailed into laughter.
And I began to trail off into the darkness.
Speaking in tongues seemed to have spoiled everything. Three of our gang were left out, and now Anthony had reduced my kindling hopeful prayers to the ugliness of the mouth that tried to utter them. I could speak in tongues but Anthony and his identical twin Joel were dark-eyed boys of epic handsomeness. And now it came down to what mattered more: baptism in the Holy Spirit, or the incontrovertible truth of good looks.
Clearly the Holy Spirit was the one I needed to care about more, the baptism into which I wanted my life to be wholly immersed and transfigured. And yet it wasn’t.
Slinking off across the field towards the Severn Barn I thought about praying in tongues right now. Wouldn’t this be the moment to pray? With those sighs and groans of the Spirit speaking hopes and longings into life within me? I tried to start; recalling some of the strange phrases my mouth had formed earlier that day. But the sighs of my own spirit were louder and soon hot tears blurred across my eyes and fell onto the grass at my feet. My ambivalence about the Spirit’s presence weighed me down in heavy guilt. Despite trying to push away the thought that good looks would have been far better ammunition to deal with life’s battles, I knew that it was too late. God knew what I was thinking and I anticipated His displeasure. I couldn’t pretend to pray. God was probably regretting wasting this kind of power on such an ungrateful girl. A story surfaced in my mind: the one in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus says to those who claimed they had faithfully followed him, “I never knew you!” I began to picture God booming down at me too, with an exasperated wave of His all-powerful arm, the one He probably used for smiting. “Joanna who? Pah! I never knew you.”
But the sound of someone actually calling my name, not in a smitey way, pulled me back from my tearful churning. I recognized the voice, at least, I could narrow it down to one of two people – Anthony or Joel Lowder. While I would never have anticipated Anthony coming to apologize, nor could I have envisaged his twin coming to make amends for his brother’s unkindness. And yet, here Joel was, jogging to catch me up and shyly reaching me with the words, “Don’t go. Forget what he said.”
There was nothing more than that, just his uncomplicated kindness, which, for a moment, rearranged the Laws of Physics. Because someone, to whom the phrase “drop dead gorgeous” evidently belonged, being moved to leave his football alone for a moment and come and find me, defied all I knew about the ways of the world so far.
7
Revival
Feeling powered up and in love with Jesus is easy when you’re surrounded by a few thousand other people who have converged for a dedicated week-long love-in with God. It’s easy when all your conversations and all the thorny details of life are framed by the bigger picture, a picture of God’s love for the world and his plan to make all things new and restored. It isn’t just easy to live in that world for a week: it’s exhilarating. It’s wonderful when every problem isn’t just shared but responded to by your fellow Jesus-loving camper with the words “Can I pray with you about that?” When every headache or attitude problem is just another opportunity to experience the power of God’s healing in your life. And when every difficult person you encounter is reframed as Satan’s attack and evidence that God is doing great things through you.
It’s easy to be excited about returning to the real world, ready to see God use you to bring a powerful change in your school, when you’re standing among rows of other children all excited about the same thing. When you’ve been told that your generation are going to be history-makers for Christ and that you’re probably not going to die because Jesus is going to return in your lifetime and gather you up in his Rapture, it puts the autumn return to school in a whole new light. It is the mission field to which we are called to be salt and light and to show people the Way. Upon our small shoulders hang school rucksacks and the salvation of our peers. And so every morning and evening I attend the Power Pack meeting with my Good News Bible, notebook and pen in hand, ready to receive all the teaching and divine inspiration God wants to impart in preparing me for my return to the mission field of Bournside Comprehensive.
From the front of the marquee shine the words on the overhead projector but we don’t need them anymore; they are more than a song now, they have become our hopes and our prayers.
&n
bsp; “I am a new creation, no more in condemnation,
Here in the grace of God I stand.
My heart is overflowing, my love just keeps on growing,
Here in the grace of God I stand.
And I will praise you Lord, yes I will praise you Lord,
And I will sing of all that you have done.
A joy that knows no limits, a lightness in my spirit,
Here in the grace of God I stand.”
Reaching the crescendo of the chorus repeat once again, Kim, the seventeen-year-old singer, cries out over the music:
“Yes Lord, we want to praise you. We want to sing of all you’ve done and are doing in our lives. And as we prepare to go back to our homes and our friends and our schools we pray Lord that you would let your kingdom and your power be known through these young people. We pray for each and every one to be filled with your power so that they would become fishers of men, fishers of souls throughout this nation.”
Her impassioned prayer swells the enthusiasm of the crowded marquee and, happy to be swept along, I press my outstretched hands into the air above me.
“I will praise you God! Yes I will praise you Lord.”
I’m almost shouting the words now. Shouting down the doubts that revival is going to begin from anything I say. Shouting out the words as if every breath will somehow stockpile enough joy and love and lightness deep in my being to make an actual difference when I get back to school.
Because this time it needs to be different. The familiar post-camp blues encroach like the tide pulling with it the harsh, unchanging memories of previous September returns to school and my blatant failure to spark so much as one conversion to Christ, let alone a whole revival. In my mind it would have to be different this year. Now I was baptised in the Spirit. This September the return to school would be preceded by daily Spirit-filled prayer meetings with Julia, where we would sing and pray and claim our friends for Christ.
“Whenever two of you on earth agree about anything you pray for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.”1
The words of Jesus popped into my mind and I stopped to search out the verse in Matthew’s Gospel. Like a butterfly catcher with her net ready to snatch and pin down the gentle flicker of life, I pulled out the Bible highlighter crayon that Charlie had bought for me at the camp bookshop, and pressed down over the words with the seal of my pink crayon, clutching them as God’s word to me.
“For where two or three come together in my Name, I am there with them.”2
There. God would be with us, I planned, mentally working up my list of names of friends to convert. I pictured the kids spilling into the classroom that we would have to ask permission to use to house the lunchtime prayer meetings and Bible studies.
I knew too that there would be some potentially tricky politics, which Satan would no doubt use to thwart the move of God. I had been chucked out of the school Christian Union in my first year at Bournside, which was far more painful for my Dad than it was for me, given that it had been his stipulation that I should join in the first place. It turns out that a Monday lunchtime spent in Mrs Spenser’s home economics classroom reading through the Book of Hebrews with three other kids and four teachers is indeed the kiss of death to an eleven-year-old, even a Bible-believing, Hell-avoiding one like me. Given that I was there under orders, my only escape seemed to be to make the best of the situation and at least see how far I had to go to provoke inappropriately timed explosions of laughter from Julia. The prayer time was usually the best moment, when everyone had their eyes closed.
“Dear God, we know that it says in the Book of Hebrews that you will judge your people and that it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But I pray that you would let me fall into the hands of someone more handsome, less terrifying and with a better sense of humour.”
But the only hands I fell into were those of Mr Deakes, the geography teacher, who, too nervous to enjoy a sense of humour, asked me to stop coming until I felt less destructive of other people’s walk with the Lord.
Now the Lord was going to hear my prayers and answer with revival. I would put all gloating aside, as befits the leader of a campus of souls being awakened to the Good News of Jesus Christ. And I would invite Mrs Spenser and Mr Deakes and their Christian Union to join us in the music hall where we’d most likely have to move once the classroom became too crowded.
“Here in the grace of God I stand.”
Kim’s crooning repetition of the last line began her wrap-up, signalling to Peter Cabot and his ministry team that it was time to give space for the Holy Spirit to move upon us children. Instinctively we moved our bodies to tune in with this shift in tempo, lowering our raised hands down to the space in front of us, which may have looked as if we were all now holding the world’s longest baguette, but was really showing God that we were ready to receive what He had for us.
And I wanted everything He’d got.
Prophecy.
Healing.
Visions.
Words of Knowledge.
Praying in tongues was just the start, the tangible evidence I needed to prove that I was chosen to do even greater things than Jesus.
But the uncomfortable corollary to all of my stretched-out, open-armed zeal was the calculation – the fear – that if God didn’t show up and heal the sick, spark revival and meet my prayerful demands, then I wasn’t in The Plan. It would signal some undiagnosed sin blocking the flow of the Holy Spirit through the vessel I was trying to be. It would show that I’d failed even to have faith the size of a mustard seed, which was all the faith Jesus said he needed to work with. And so I would come to heaven and discover that a mountain of unconfessed sin festering within me would consign me to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
So, as the lightness of being in which camp had bathed us gave way to heavy dread about my absence from the Book of Life, I steeled myself for the return to school, where I prayed that the ridicule of teeth would be replaced by awe-struck acceptance of the Gospel I was about to proclaim.
Notes
1 Matthew 18.19.
2 Matthew 18.20.
8
Poisoned Pens
As it turned out, it wasn’t from the darkness of school that the fresh onslaught of bullying came. It was the church youth group. Which is perhaps why, when an envelope addressed to me appeared in the Bible I’d left lying on the floor under a discarded pizza box, I sensed no danger.
Inside the envelope was a piece of paper torn out of a blue notebook with a scrawl of green felt-tip words across it, “Can Opener! You are so ugly why don’t you just kill yourself.” There wasn’t a question mark because it wasn’t a question, rather a conclusion calling time on any right I thought I had to partake in life’s pleasures. I was not to belong in the same way as the others, even here in this church youth group where the author of the letter clearly existed. The pizzas, the midnight hikes through the Cotswolds, the camping trips and parties: these were not for me because these were about the space to blossom and reveal yourself and find as you did so that you could connect with other people and be discovered by them and, hopefully, eventually, be loved. But this person had written to tell me there was no point in me being involved in all that life and flourishing: it wasn’t for me.
Later I stuffed the note into a box of letters and pushed it to the back of my wardrobe. Perhaps the letter might have been God’s way of leading me out of temptation and delivering me from evil. So for a few brave days I tried to embrace this line of explanation. “Be thankful,” I admonished myself in hollow moments on the way to school, in French lessons, and during cold cross-country runs, “surely this is God keeping you safe from sin. Just keep being thankful. You are set apart, Joanna, set apart for Him. You knew it would never feel comfortable.”
Then the next letter arrived, blasphemously poked into the pages of my Bible again. I was too tired to convince myself it was the hand of God. And so when, a couple of
weeks later, Debbie and Dave took us to a youth event in Birmingham, crammed with all the compelling ingredients you’d need for a high octane Christian youth rally, I finally combusted. All it took was the absence that evening of the boy who I knew must have written it, some loud music and the anonymity of slipping into the stream of other teenagers making their way to the front of the stage in response to an emotional altar call. The fact that the invitation was to unsaved teenagers to ask Jesus into their lives was neither here nor there. Now I was ready to initiate a conversation with God and issue Him a very specific invitation to intervene in my life.
It was a tear-soaked prayer in which I haemorrhaged three or four years’ worth of gagged sadness. It must have been rather alarming, and potentially disappointing, for the woman on the team who’d taken me for a would-be convert and come to kneel beside me to prayerfully witness my conversion. I don’t remember her saying a lot, but I do remember telling her and God that if God wanted to He could just come and make the braces fall off my teeth and put my teeth and jaws straight without all this hassle of head-braces and train-tracked teeth.
He could just do it.
Now. If You wanted to God, You could!
I really believed that He could.
But God was taking the long way round as God so often tends to do.
9
The First Leaf
Everyone needs to find their thing, especially in their teens. This is when you become able to have your thing that isn’t your parent’s thing or your teacher’s, and possibly not even your friend’s. It is yours, like your Unique Selling Point, with which you want to make your own mark on the world; the thing that will hoist you up on to the ladder of Becoming Someone. Which means, when you’re a teenager, that it’s almost instinctive to start building your brand with the way you look. Because when you’re a young woman beauty is about the only thing you possess in bucketloads over everyone else. And it’s the thing that most quickly and easily provokes a good reaction: replenishing one’s emotional cache with affirmation.
A Lot Like Eve Page 5