Glimpse

It was just for a short while, but we did make it to Bethel's awesome Friday night worship service. It was the first time I'd been in the Sanctuary area as a part of their body of believers. We got there early and sat a while watching people gather and listening to the worship team band get ready for the service.

Does anyone remember the analog radio dial? Perhaps they still exist out there somewhere, where you actually turn a dial or do something continuous (not like clicking along in uniform increments of frequency as is usual now) to scroll up and down the radio band. If you do this very slowly, stations will fade in and out; some will get very clear before they fade and others will barely come in before they're gone. You'll pick up a piece of a sentence here or a fragment of a song there, with stretches of static in between.

That's what it felt like in my head as I looked from one person to the next and my ears heard pieces of conversations fade in and out. With a couple of people, I looked at them and felt as though I'd known them for years, like passing a radio station in the band where you recognize a song from just the brief moment that comes in clearly. People were registering with me, fading in and out amid the static, and I got a syllable -- three phonemes -- when my eyes passed over one particular person; it said, "Sol," (pronounce it somewhere between Saul and soul) and I don't know whether that was a fragment of a bigger word, was its own word in a sentence, or a portion of the person's name. It was just spoken in my head very clearly and had nothing to do with anything I was hearing at the time.

Though that was the only syllable that came through, I felt the fullness of nascent pronouncements when I looked all over the roomful of people, as if there were a statement or message in there concerning each one of them but something was impeding my ability to "tune in" to everything save that one breakthrough, runaway syllable.

Now, I could tell you only vaguely what the person looked like; the memory has faded out. It's not as though it got burned into my mind or carried any sense of great urgency. It seems significant, though, that the potential for much, much more seemed already to be there.

The same feeling did not occur at any of the three services on Sunday, nothing of the same sort at all. The next time I go there, though, I'm going to go sit in the same place where it happened on the same evening of the week and try again, hoping to trigger a more lengthy "download," as it were.

That was my first download ever, though; an infinitesimal glimpse of potential things far greater. I can only marvel at whether He might have done this to whet my appetite for something to come more fully at a later time. It's certainly something I'll not soon forget.


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