Unleash The Miraculous Every Day: Living The Spirit Contemporary Life Sample

DAY 1: UNLEASH THE MIRACULOUS

When he looked out over the crowds, his heart broke. So confused and aimless they were, like sheep with no shepherd. Matthew 9:36 (MSG)
When I was 19, I started a job as an emergency responder. I vividly remember one of my first calls because it started me on the journey I’m still on today.

As we arrived at the scene in the ambulance, the driver turned off the siren, and I was struck by how eerily quiet it was. Then, in the distance, I heard the faint sound of a child crying. I spotted him as soon as the ambulance stopped: a little boy no more than a couple years old sitting in the middle of the highway, wearing only a diaper, surrounded by broken glass and debris.

A crowd had gathered, but no one dared go near him, probably because they were afraid of doing more harm than good. Not far from him lay a baby with a fractured skull and a young woman who was barely hanging on to life. Two other men lay beyond them—one already dead and the other badly hurt. At the time I didn’t know how profoundly this experience would affect me, but it hit me hard when I discovered that both parents died later that day. The little boy survived, but both mom and dad had been ripped from him in an instant, forever altering his world and, to a certain degree, mine.

As I continued to encounter situations like this one, my heart broke for people. Some nights I couldn’t get the thoughts of the day out of my mind. These experiences caused me to ask some tough questions. Most of all, I wondered why religious Christianity seemed so irrelevant in this pain-filled world.

I loved church, but I didn’t want a faith that only worked within the four walls of the church. I wanted to be able to live out my beliefs in a way that really worked in the “real world,” even in hospitals and in ditches at 3:00 a.m. What I wanted was a Spirit Contemporary approach: an approach that allowed me to see God’s miraculous power everywhere I went and where I could share the love of Jesus in relevant and real ways that met the needs of the people right in front of me.