What do you do with something you cannot understand? There is a psychological term for this. It's called cognitive dissonance. Two precepts that both seem plausible contradict one another, and it's not simply a paradox or an antinomy. It's not really that they are precepts at the level to which I'm referring. They are experiences that don't fit with what you are used to or what you believe are possible. Yet, there they are, and you cannot deny that something is happening. What do you do with something like that?

What I'm talking about, I suppose, is what anyone might do with a novel situation. How do you react when you find yourself in a part of the world you've never been before.

I recall when we went to England for a conference in Manchester, and we had to get from the airport, through London, and out to Oakleigh Park using the railway system. As described in the Wikipedia, Oakleigh Park is a place in the London Borough of Barnet. It adjoins Whetstone, and is often regarded as part of it. However it has its own identity and its own railway station, which is on the northern boundary of the London railway system. We were going to be staying at St. Petersbourne, which is retreat house about a quarter of a mile from that railway station.

I had never been in the London underground before. We had five bags to get through that system, and it was not fun. Sometimes I could not tell if we were getting on the correct train. We had to transfer lines. We had to go up and down tunnel staircases. We had to find seats and places to put the bags on often crowded railway cars. We had to read maps on the sides of cars and the sides of railway platforms that looked more like someone dropped spaghetti on the floor than anything else. I lost it. I was already tired from the overnight flight, and my patience was gone. I became short tempered. Between the two of us we figured it out and by the end of the week, we were competent users of the London underground.

What people do with novel situations and experiences is related to our abilities to perceive visually and auditorially, process information, and make contact with our environment and the people we encounter in it. I know these things from my training in gestalt therapy and my study of psychology.

However, knowing facts about what kinds of things might be going on in a person at any given time and being able to deal with something oneself are two related but very different things. I get flustered easily, start spitting, let off steam, and then I concentrate, blocking out peripheral stimuli (including people), and process the situation internally. When I have figured it out, then I resurface in the land of the living and put my solution into effect. When the situation will not allow me to do that, I just keep spitting. It's not the best way to be. Thank God (and I mean that) for a gracious and patient woman who one day found herself married to me.

So, recently I found myself in another novel situation. I was listening to someone who maintained that she has a prophetic ministry. I watched her move among the congregation of the church, stopping with this person and that one, saying things that touched people deeply. Tears flowed. People were comforted and encouraged.

When she came to me and my wife, she said that I was a student of the word, the Bible. She said others things as well, but let's just stop with that one. How did she know that? Did the Pastor of the church "clue" her in on people before the service? She said things about me that I would affirm, and she said things about my relationship with my wife that some could say were so, but others might say, "Well, isn't that true of us all?" How much of what she said and did came from her own keen, God given sensitivity and observation, and how much came to her as given directly from God in that moment? I had been leafing through my Bible during the service; did she observe me doing that? If she did, is that when God gave her the thoughts she shared? Were these prophetic utterances simply the impressions and thoughts, the interpretations of experience of a godly woman who had given herself to ministry for many years? Were they something more; were they the spiritual thoughts of such a woman in consultation with the Spirit of God who indwells us both? Did they come with the authority that is displayed in the Bible when a Biblical prophet said, "Thus saith the Lord…?"

I usually have a problem with people who claim the authority that belongs to God.

In my younger days as a Christian I would never have imagined that I could one day be attending a church where such things take place. I am pretty conservative theologically, but I'm not stuffy. I am not a high church, liturgical Christian. I have always thought of myself as a simple and sure believer and follower of the one who got my attention and turned my life around, who really gave me a life worth living, and without whom I would have lived a short life, debauched and characterised with futility, frustration, endless searching for answers and the truth, but characterised by loss and regret. That I escaped all that is the real meaning to the saying "I got saved".

So, what did I do with this novel situation? I lived through it. I watched it taking place. I experienced it. I don't have the answers, in the sense that I have not finished taking it inside and figuring out the explanation. I don't know if I ever will have the answers. I know I'm supposed to be at that church right now, even though there are several things there that drive me crazy. At least I did not end up spitting in the process!