Praying in Unusual Circumstances

Something happened last Monday evening that was totally, completely out of the ordinary...so much so that I am still amazed.

I had just finished re-reading the Gospel According to Matthew the day before, and was wondering how to apply Matthew 25:31-46 in everyday life. There seems to be a clear command there for us to care for our fellow Christian brothers and sisters—the implication seems to be that how we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ is evidence of whether we are truly God's children or not. (Which seems patently obvious, but what are the practical implications of working it out in everyday life?)

Anyhow, I was taking the bus home on Monday evening. Now, I was travelling earlier than normal—I usually leave work quite late—and furthermore, the bus I should have caught was delayed, and I ended up waiting half an hour and catching the next bus. So I was on completely not my normal bus, twice removed!

The bus was full. Every seat was taken, though no one was standing. I was sitting near the back of the bus.

Suddenly, I heard a woman across from me crying out; I looked over, and noticed she was reading a Gideon's New Testament. She continued crying out; someone asked if she was okay; some other people started moving away from her.

Then she called out in a panicked voice, "Is there a Christian on the bus? Someone who can pray in tongues with me?" I normally keep to myself on the bus—read my Bible sometimes, but that's about it—but there was nothing normal about this situation. This was a fellow believer in the throes of spiritual distress! I couldn't very well not speak up: I wouldn't be able to live with myself afterward. So I called back, "I'm a Christian, but I don't pray in tongues...."

The person sitting beside me moved aside so that I could get up and sit down beside this lady (I won't use her name, to protect her privacy). As I was moving over to where she was sitting, she started praying aloud in tongues. If I'd stopped to think about it, I probably would have asked myself what I was getting into; but everything happened so fast, I didn't even have time to think about it. At any rate, I was almost certainly the only person on that bus who could provide this lady with the help she needed.

She had her bag on the seat beside her, so standing beside her, I asked, "Are you okay?" She explained that she'd had a physical, oppressive feeling, like she was undergoing a spiritual attack. "Can I pray with you," I asked.

So she moved her bag out of the way, and I sat down beside her, and asked her for her name, so I could pray for her by name. She replied, and we prayed, me out loud, on a crowded bus, for the three or four minutes before we were getting close to my bus stop (in fact, I skipped my stop, to get off at the next one 400 yards further down the road).

I prayed that the Lord God and the Holy Spirit would protect and guide her, in the name of Jesus Christ, by whose broken body and shed blood we are saved. Of course, in such a spontaneous situation, I just prayed as the words came to me. The bus was noisy, so I had to speak up as I prayed, so that she could hear me—it was probably loud enough that others could hear me as well. But she and I had our eyes closed, and we were, of course, just focused on praying.

Providentially, the Bible School assignment I'd completed just a couple of weeks previously gave me the words to reassure her—after we'd finished praying—that Jesus Christ commands invisible legions of angels (Joshua 5:13-15; 2 Kings 6:15-17; Revelation 19:11-16), and as not only our Lord and Saviour but also our protector, can fight the spiritual battles that we cannot fight. We're not alone, and we don't have to fight these battles on our own!

She asked for my name, too, and my church, and I found out her church as well: a Foursquare Gospel church. I didn't know anything about the Fousquare Gospel movement, but oddly enough, when I got home, a TV documentary on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson was just starting, and I learned all about it!

That evening and the next day, I was in a stupor. What had just happened, I wondered. After a lot of sober-minded reflection, I can honestly say only that it all just unfolded in some strange, Spirit-led way. It was the strangest thing, not least because I was on a bus I don't even normally take—but for this lady, I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. God in His sovereign providence had led me to that be on that bus, that evening, to minister to that lady.

She later contacted our church to thank me for what I'd done. The whole episode was as strange to her as it was to me! I found out that when she started getting this oppressive physical sensation, she pulled out her Gideon's New Testament, which she doesn't even normally carry with her. I learned that these were the verses she'd felt led to read before I prayed for her:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his Cross (Colossians 1:15-20).

So from a non-believer's point of view, here were a couple of crazy Christians having their own prayer service at the back of a crowded bus. But it was a witness to the power of the Word and the Spirit—and the Spirit working through the Word—and I pray that in some small way it advanced the Kingdom. Had she been having a medical emergency, I wouldn't have had the skills to help. But if it's a spiritual emergency, evidently God has given me a gift I didn't know I had—albeit a gift he'd already given me opportunity to practise in our church's weekly prayer meetings. I'd never before had to exercise this gift in such a rubber-meets-the-road situation.

And the strangest thing of all? A non-Charismatic Calvinist had the privilege of relying on the Holy Spirit to minister in word and prayer to a Charismatic sister in Christ, seeking the intercession of our common Mediator and High Priest, our soul hope and salvation.

Soli Deo gloria!