“Daddy!” The voice startled me. It was after 10 o’clock at night, and I thought the kids were sound asleep. I turned to look from the kitchen and saw my daughter in the bathroom with a bloody nose. She inherited the family’s nose bleeds and actually has them quite frequently. It took a little while for the bleeding to stop, and then I cleaned her up and walked her back to bed. I asked if she was scared, and she replied, “Yes.” I talked with her for a few minutes about my nose bleeds and her grandfather’s nose bleeds.
All that reassurance just wasn’t enough. I could tell she was still afraid of what was going on, so I asked if she would like for me to pray with her.
A couple days later, in my morning reading in S.D. Gordon’s book, Quiet Talks on Power, Gordon raised the question, “What is power?” Power, he said, is one of four words that are difficult to define. What is power? Where does it come from? What does it consist of? How is it evidenced? How does it work? Gordon continued that power has its source in God alone and that it is made known in the world through the Holy Spirit, which explains our difficulty to define it. Power is of another world.
As I sat on the edge of my daughter’s bed, I thought to myself for a second or two that there just wasn’t any power in my reassurance that everything would be ok for the rest of the night. The power to calm her came only through my tapping into the power of the Holy Spirit by summoning it through prayer. Inviting God’s presence into her bedroom that night and her knowing that God is all powerful and all loving was enough to change my daughter’s demeanor and help her go back to sleep.
Power is the difference between the lawyer working with a distraught wife to handle the affairs of her deceased husband of 50 years and the friend taking the same woman aside and quietly praying with her and showing her the ways of God. Human help is all well and good, let’s not discount the legal system or any other mechanisms in place that are meant to get things done. Power, however, reaches beyond the reality and difficulty of our circumstances to enable the Holy Spirit to quietly speak into our lives and bring a sense of calmness and order. Power is what makes it possible for us to face tomorrow in spite of today’s difficulty and sorrow, and this power comes only through our inviting the Holy Spirit into our circumstances.
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