Baptism in the Holy Spirit
This testimony believe it or not starts in the year 2001…in fact it all stems from September 12. 2001…the day after 9/11 when the Twin Towers fell. While on the job that day my Catholic boss and I prayed for the victims and the families of those who were affected by this disaster. My boss, who’s name is Steve, prayed out the Lord’s prayer and then I prayed whatever the Lord put on my heart. For some reason this spoke to Steve and the next day we had a lengthy discussion at work about the Lord, Christianity and some of the differences we had (as I was not Catholic). One thing that I did share with him is that I pray in tongues and that it was a gift from the Lord for every believer. Time went on and few and far between we would talk about faith, the Lord and prayer. He was always very nice and humble in his approach and opened the door many times for me to travel overseas on mission trips, for which I am grateful. Fast forward to this year November 2007. At work one day Steve was telling me about some pain he was having in his thumb…it was swelling up and did not look good. At the same time he was having some back pain for which he needed to go to doctor. As Steve and I were leaving for the day on Friday, I felt led to go and pray for his thumb and back. It wasn’t a long prayer or anything, but we prayed and then parted ways. Then on Monday we were working at another job and we had just sat down to lunch and Steve told me that I really blessed him on Friday for praying for him and he shared a little more and then dropped this bombshell…which about left my mouth hanging wide open. He said “And, I was wondering if you could for pray for me to baptized in the Holy Spirit.” It was the last thing I was suspecting. He then went on to share that he had been praying for the last seven months to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. It turns out that he had started reading a book called: “Let the fire fall.” Which is about the charismatic Catholic renewal. Steve said he was talking to his mentor, who is a spirit-filled priest, about some of this stuff and mentioned that I had shared a while ago (Sept 2001) that I spoke in tongues and such. His mentor then told Steve to have me pray for him to be baptized in Holy Spirit. So the next day Steve came over to my house and we prayed. It was awesome. He began to heat up when I began praying for him and he could sense the presence of the Lord. I asked if he wanted to speak out in his new language and as he began, he spoke and laughed. He then rolled over and was basically on the floor in my family room experiencing this new gift. He said that he was tingling all over. In his ears, head, mouth, nose, lips, teeth, hands, legs, he said he felt like electricity going through him. Needless to say he was blessed and overjoyed. He said he had never experienced anything like that before. I talked to him a few weeks later and he said that he began to sing in tongues and said his prayer life has gone up a couple notches, saying even that he is laughing in prayer!!! Go God!
-Andy S.