Last week my team and I went down to Biloxi, Mississippi with a church that we partner with from up north. They had invited us to come down to work on the rebuilding that is still taking place from Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast. It was a bit difficult for some of us because there was alot of mudding, scraping etc but not a lot of people interaction. I am glad to have learned about insulation, putting up drywall and even mudding corners (it was fun to learn these new skills!) but I also want the Word to able to be shared. I know that we were praying for people to come across our path so we could hear their stories. Midweek we came to the house we were working on and the neighbor next door was just walking into his house. We yelled a hello and he came over. It was a short conversation because he was about to go to sleep after working all night. So we thought that was that. A couple hours later the man came back over announcing that he had a surprise for us! This caused us to try to guess what the surprise might be. Was it food? Was it a dance? What could it be?!
The man, whose name we discovered was Willie, came back over with a saxaphone in his hand. He said that he used to play the saxaphone when he was a child and just yesterday (our first day being at that house) was the first day that he picked it up again. As he laid his head on his pillow to sleep a couple hours earlier he heard a voice tell him to pick up his saxaphone and to come over and play a song for us. He didn’t have the music for the song, but the song, the notes, just came into his mind! What he started to play for us was Amazing Grace. I could just feel the amazement we felt in the air. It was beautiful. The notes just danced through this house admidst the insulation and walls that were just being put up. He played the whole song perfectly, even though he had never played it before. He said he was not a religious man and that he never heard that voice before.
When he first came over he acknowledged that the voice was God.
Our Father wants to raise up worshipers that will worship in Spirit and in truth. He was running after this man. This man heard this voice and obeyed. His obedience amazed me because so many of us believers wouldn’t have obeyed so quickly! He could have felt really foolish but I didn’t even sense this from him. I believe that through our prayers and the Holy Spirit within us, the Holy Spirit was able to reach this man next door. Oh, may he keep responding!
