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As I write this on Christmas Eve 2007, spouses are welcoming their uniformed loved ones from Iraq and Afghanistan for the holidays. As they hug and kiss, they already know that in a few days they will lose them again. If only they could stay! It’s a bitter-sweet experience. In this life, the visitation of the Holy Spirit is like that.
The Holy Spirit is the “first installment” of what is to come, the foretaste of heaven (2 Corinthians 1:22; Eph 1:14). He is the kiss of God upon the uniqueness of each of us. But the experience is so great that it brings an intense longing for what is yet to come.
“I Needed That.” I didn’t know the Holy Spirit in this way until I was forty-one and asked some lay people to pray over me for the “baptism in the Holy Spirit.” Oh sure, I had been baptized and confirmed. I had professed religious vows, and I had been ordained twelve years earlier. And surely the Holy Spirit had been at work in those moments. But what happened on that Christmas Eve in 1970 was a breakthrough, a new beginning. From that moment, as I explain in…
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