Fiona Veitch Smith

A Gardener’s Gospel – Week 16

The garden is going through a growth spurt. Andre, the lawn, is showing signs that his bald patches may soon fill in, the St John’s Wort is growing like a triffid and the box wood is sprouting shoots faster than a postman clocking off for lunch. It’s time to get out the power tools.

I struggled with hand shears for years, snipping and snapping one shoot at a time. It was slow and cumbersome and the result was decidedly uneven. Then, after helping with a house-clearing, I inherited an electric hedge trimmer which I insisted on calling my ‘chain saw’. The first day on the job, all revved up with the immense power at my disposal, I sawed my way through a dog wood, a box wood, a laurel and a bank of rose bushes. With eyes flashing and blades whirring, I spun around to tackle a Virginia creeper when suddenly the saw went dead. To my horror I realised that I’d forgotten about Power Tool Rule #1 – Keep The Cord Away From The Blade. And to my greater horror I saw that my dad and husband were laughing at me through the French window with that ‘typical woman’ look on their faces.

Baptism of the Spirit

In 1992 (when I was 22) I experienced what some people call the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’, the ‘anointing’ or the ‘second blessing’ – a release of the charismatic gifts of God into my life. It was a year or so before the so-called Toronto Blessing made headlines around the world and I was all alone in my flat. Although I happily attended a non-charismatic Baptist church I was a frequent visitor to interdenominational ‘revival’ meetings, Pentecostal churches and Holy Spirit ‘seeker’ services in and around the small university town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

I had been up for prayer to receive ‘the blessing’ a number of times but just got irritated when I felt the over-enthusiastic pressure of hands on my forehead as if they were trying to force me down. That just cheesed me off – if I was going to be ‘slain in the Spirit’, I wanted to be damn sure (if you’ll pardon the expression) that it was God doing the slaying. I was diagnosed as having a resistant spirit and sent home with a prescription for a regular dose of 1 Corinthians 12.

Damming it up

For weeks, whenever I prayed, I saw a picture of a dam wall with water trickling out of little cracks. At first I wasn’t sure what it meant, but after a while I realised that the dam represented my life and that the water was the Holy Spirit, building up in all His power, waiting to be released. But nothing happened. Until one evening while I was sitting at home reading the Bible and praying quietly I suddenly felt a bubbling inside my throat. It was a physical sensation, like that feeling you get when you need to burp, and I opened my mouth to let it out. But instead of a belch a torrent of words burst forth – I didn’t know what they meant, but I knew, without a doubt, that they were words of worship to God. So I let them come. And then I began to sing, in this beautiful language, feeling each word as it formed in my mouth and releasing it melodically into the air. As I did so I felt an incredible warmth spread through my whole body. Then I saw the dam again and this time the sluice gates opened and a torrent of hydro power exploded out. Then I began to shake – my hands first, then my arms, shoulders and feet. It was like having an electric current surge through me – but it didn’t hurt at all.

I don’t have space to go into all that happened that incredible night, but suffice to say it was the most amazing experience of worship I had ever had. And the emotion that was paramount was love: an all-consuming love for God.

Getting to know the gifts

That was the start of my life as a charismatic Christian. Soon after that I began to have words of knowledge and wisdom for people; things that I could not have known unless God told me. These words usually revealed hidden secrets, fears and hurts that were stopping people from having a closer relationship with God – usually Christians, but sometimes non-Christians too. That’s how I knew that what I was experiencing was a true gift – it brought healing and restoration and has continued to do so until this day. But I’m aware that not everyone’s experience with the charismata (the gifts of the Spirit) is a positive one. Like power tools, these gifts can work wonders in our gardens, but if mishandled, can also cause damage.

Over the next couple of weeks I will share with you some of the good and bad experiences I’ve had as a charismatic Christian including the hurt that has been caused to others, and provide a bit of insight into what these gifts are. Power tools can be a blessing but they need to be handled with care.

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Acts 1:8