11. Did I have a Vision on the Ladder?

 Sitting Still and all Alone during a Hysterical Moment.

It was a normal Sunday evening in the 1980s. Bracknell Baptist Church was meeting at what should have been an average service at the assembly hall of Garth Hill School. By then, the congregation had grown too large in numbers to fit in our own 70s-style church building. Therefore, we moved into temporary accommodation at the school until the construction of our much larger new building, to be called the Kerith Centre, was completed.

During the latter half of the service, two women, Tina and Judy, were invited to testify on the front stage. They shared their experience from their visit to the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, one of John Wimber's Vineyard group of charismatic churches. With its senior Pentecostal pastor, Randy Clark, leading the congregation, an already familiar hysteria fell on the whole Canadian church. The Toronto Blessing. Here, people were shaking, laughing, crying, screaming, falling on their backs, growling, and even experiencing paralysis, and displayed hysteria. For anyone completely unchurched, walking in and witnessing such phenomena would have fled terrified, and associated it with demonic influence and power. Instead, the whole phenomenon was labelled as Slain by the Spirit. That is, the Holy Spirit.

When the two married women had finished their testimony, all of a sudden, the whole congregation here at Garth Hill School went into very similar hysterics. Like across the Atlantic Ocean, everyone displayed very similar characteristics to those in Toronto. 

Except me, who sat still and quiet amidst the commotion. Why wasn't I "slain by the Holy Spirit"? Here, in that large room, middle-class businessmen who were dressed in a suit and tie during the week in the office, and renowned for their British emotional restraint, fell into a state of supreme ecstasy. And there was I, sitting as still and quiet as a statue, observing everything around me without partaking. At the time, I really believed that the Holy Spirit had overlooked me.

Fortunately, this occurred en masse only once in the life of our Bracknell church, but while I was visiting a friend, I showed him my photo album of the Grand Canyon, which I visited in 1995. One photo featured a panel fixed to a wall. On it, a quote from Psalm 104:24, which reads:

O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

I took this at the Grand Canyon Village, 1995.

This graduate friend was married and a father of two healthy, growing children. Yet, when he saw the photo, he jumped up, yelped, and shook for a moment, startling me, who sat opposite. Later, this same person came to visit me at my apartment. On the bookshelf, the spine of one of the books read, The Cup of Trembling. He went straight for it, and after pulling it out and reading the subtitle, Jerusalem and Bible Prophecy, he immediately placed it back on the shelf. For that brief moment, he thought I was reading about the Toronto Blessing. Instead, the book was about the Middle East and its Islamic influence. There were other cases of adult men trembling while in a prayer meeting or simply leaving after the end of the meeting.

Healed. Really?

Staying within this spirit charisma, in 1989, I left Bracknell Baptist Church, and for several months, I was without a church to go to, until I was introduced by another friend to Ascot Baptist Church, in the next town from Bracknell. At that time, Barry Buckingham was the pastor. However, in 1996, he was asked to stand down over a serious misdemeanour, and for a year, we were without a pastor, with the church led by the Baptist Union branch office in Windsor. Then, in 1997, shortly before I took off for Singapore, a new pastor, the late Phil Rogers, arrived, along with his family of three teenage sons.

It was during his ministry that one of our members, Mark Froud, developed leukaemia. When our elders learned about the Yoido Full Gospel Church in the far east, Phil took Mark to South Korea to pray for Mark's healing from the disease. The Assemblies of God church, with up to 830,000 members in 2007, was the world's largest megachurch, which was led by David Yonggi Cho. It boasted a "prayer mountain" where each day, many would ascend the mountain to pray specifically for healing. Reports were that many were healed of their illnesses and infirmities. These reports encouraged Phil and Mark to fly out with the intention of returning with Mark healed of his leukaemia.

There seemed to be a strong similarity between the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, and the more famous Our Lady of Lourdes in Southern France. The latter is famed for the number of supernatural healings taking place there. Yet, never once had I heard the NHS recommend a visit either to Lourdes or Yoido. It is also interesting, to my mind at least, that all three churches that boasted divine intervention, including the Toronto Airport Fellowship, didn't believe in the Eternal Security of the Believer, or Once Saved Always Saved. Rather, each takes the Arminian worldview that one's eternal life must be maintained by lifelong faithfulness, or risk losing one's salvation altogether while still alive. With the doctrine of free grace compromised, the door remains open for other false teachings or manifestations to creep in.

Our two Ascot members returned from South Korea. Mark was still unwell, and a few months later, he died while he was still in his prime, to be with the Lord.

And so the beat goes on. Reports of divine healing, but throughout my half-century as a Christian believer, I have never witnessed any supernatural healing, especially of the instantaneous kind.

Indeed, about two or three years ago, Paul, our church treasurer, went down with paralysis of his lower body, from his waist down, and he had to spend a year in hospital as an inpatient, followed by a spell in a rehabilitation home. Each day, prayers went up for him to recover. Much to the amazement of the doctors, he gradually regained his mobility. We all praised God and thanked him for his recovery.

Considering my own wife's illness. Suffering from Functional Neurological Disorder, which makes her wheelchair-bound when outdoors, prayers were offered on her behalf, but after 13 years, she shows little recovery. Rather, to this day, she still experiences waves of pain, and she's in and out of the hospital. Therefore, I ask, did God show favouritism when he healed Paul after just a year, but not Alex over 13 years?

Paul spent a year cared for by the NHS, with doctors and well-trained nurses meeting all his needs. This was quite a contrast to two specific healings, both recorded in the Bible. In the New Testament, Acts, chapter 3, records a beggar, crippled from birth. When Peter and John approached him, they gained his attention. The beggar was expecting a donation, but Peter said,

Silver and gold, I have none, but what I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!

And immediately, the beggar rose to his feet for the first time in his life. He danced with joy over the miracle. No prayers. No hospitals. No doctors. No nurses or care homes. Instead, a straightforward healing.

Paul and Barnabas in Lystra had a similar experience. While Paul was preaching about the resurrection of Christ in the marketplace, he saw a man who was also crippled from birth. When he saw that the beggar had faith, and without any prayers, Paul commanded him to rise up and walk. He did. When the crowds saw the miracle, they all attributed Paul and Barnabas as their gods Hermes and Jupiter, appearing in the likeness of men (Acts 16).

These were true divine miracles. And their main purpose? To convince the crowds that Jesus of Nazareth is the true Messiah, who died for their sins, was buried, and on the third day, rose from the dead, and gives eternal life to all who believe and trust in him. A far cry from spending a year as an inpatient at a hospital! It's by careful Bible study, especially in the Book of Acts, that the working of miracles was restricted to the apostles only. There seems to be no record of any other disciple or believer other than the thirteen (the 12 disciples of Christ and Paul the apostle) working miracles, especially of instant healing and even raising the dead.

Considering all that I have experienced here, and never witnessed a proper divine healing, I can't help but feel very sceptical when I hear about modern healing. For a start, those I have seen prayed for were already Christian believers. Neither of the two beggars was a believer until their miraculous healing, which also converted them to Christ.

I was (and still am) holding this worldview that one October morning in 1992, I set off to do a day's window cleaning. On my way to the street, I called at a friend's home not only for a coffee and chat, but to clean his windows. It was a regular call I have been making for some time. However, a disagreement arose between us, and he dismissed me from cleaning his windows. Feeling very downcast and mourning over the loss of a friend, I made my way to the street for the rest of the day.

I was up on the ladder cleaning one of the upper-floor bedroom windows when a sudden thought, almost a vision, entered my head. It was quite sudden and intense. I saw myself standing on the summit of the Mount of Olives, praying over Jerusalem, its panorama making a spectacular view from the summit.

What went through my mind, October 1992.

I gasped. Somehow, I knew that this was a divine intervention. But this needed proving. The test lay in funding for the trip. Up to that point, I made enough to live on adequately without getting into debt. But from that week onwards, I found that I had £20 to put away into the savings each week. There was no interruption. Week after week, I saved up until the start of August 1993. After 15 years since 1978, of staying firmly on the ground, once again, I took to the air from London to Israel, Tel Aviv.

As I sat in the well-used Monarch Airlines, little did I know that the "vision" I had while I was feeling low and worthless would open up not just this 1993 trip to Israel, but the next seven years of my life, which I believe had some divine inspiration.

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Next Week, with a rucksack on my back, I was alone - but not really alone.