My First Encounter With The Holy Spirit
The night of the ecumenical Thanksgiving service came, and I met Kim at her Church’s parking lot, and I drove us to the tiny little church in Donora, PA. The service consisted of different bands playing and different preachers preaching... all in all it was a nice service. Then this one preacher came to the pulpit and said, “We are now going to sing a hymn and welcome you to stand up and join in with us.” We all stood up and they started singing what sounded like just an old-fashioned hymn... and I just got so overwhelmed that I began CRYING.... literally sobbing, tears running down my face, nose dripping SOBBING!!! Kim saw this and she started asking people for kleenex, finally somebody three rows back gave her some!!!, and came to my messy rescue! hahaha. Why was I crying??? When they started playing, at first I was so OVERJOYED at the BEAUTY of what I was hearing, but then became sad that I had missed out on this wonderful Beautiful Music for forty years!!!! It was wild - I just cold NOT stop crying!!! (The Holy Spirit first got a hold of me here at this point, through His beautiful music!!!) This happened at the First United Methodist Church of Donora, pastored by David K. Means on Sunday, November 22, 1998.
That night on the way home, as I was driving (Kim was my passenger, we carpooled) Kim started witnessing to me some more and I ended up pulling over on the side of the road and gave my life to Jesus. Since we met that night at the parking lot of her church in Sutersville and rode in my truck to the service, I knew where she attended church. At work she was telling me about the Holy Spirit and how He was really at the Church where she goes (she was still a babe in Christ herself), and invited me to come. I told her “I’ll think about it.” The name of Kim’s Church is “The Church” in Sutersville, PA, pastored by Frank Rocco. The following Wednesday, for some reason, I got the gumption to go to her church, so I showed up without telling her that I was coming, and she immediately saw me there and said, let’s go up front, I can’t hear myself singing up there so we moved to the third pew from the front.
The next day at work I told her, “I didn’t feel the Holy Spirit there at Your Church, Kim. I still feel the same, nothing happened to me at all.” She told me later on that she was CRUSHED when I told her this, but she hid it pretty well! (And as You will read, I was so WRONG about the absence of the Holy Spirit in that Church!)