Friday Night at the Garden House

By David Hobbs

It was Friday night, July 5, 2007 and I was at the folks’ house in Ohio, visiting for a few days before going to Atlanta for the tradeshow of the Christian Bookseller’s Convention.
Years ago, Dad had a little garden house built in the thicket behind the house. Two thirds of it was for lawn and garden equipment while the other third was a little apartment. The apartment had never been used for much until this spring, when my son Joe spent a couple of months there working on the property which had become much overgrown due to the folks’ increasing age and physical infirmity.
My son Joe had fixed up the little apartment and lived there, a space where he could be alone and live according to the dictates of his iconoclastic lifestyle. It was still sparse and bare, but he had gotten the woodstove fired up and working, had a bed frame to throw down a sleeping pad on, a wood table and chair, some candles and a kerosene lamp.
I didn’t need it to sleep in—the spare upstairs bedroom in their house was plenty adequate—but found it was perfect for my needs as a prayer closet. It was far enough away from the house that I could close myself in, and have plenty of freedom to be as loud as I wanted: to sing, to pray, to shout—however the Spirit led. And so it as there I went Friday night at bedtime to seek the Lord.
I took some matches with me, and a flashlight, to get the lamp and candles fired up. Unfortunately, the candles had all burned down to stumps, and when I lit the lamp, I couldn’t get much flame out of it. The more I turned up the wick, the smaller it seemed to burn. I soon discovered why: it as out of kerosene and the little flame came from burning up the residue of fuel in the wick. Since I didn’t want to keep the flashlight burning, I had to accept total darkness as the prayer milieu of the night.
There were a couple of windows in the apartment, but since the moon was on the wane and the building was immersed in the thicket of brush and trees, the darkness was almost complete.
I sat on the chair by the little table and began to pray, calling on the Name of the Lord and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I got as loud as I felt my spirit wanted, rising to my feet and singing worship to the Lord into the darkness, sensing His presence gradually filling the room. Then, I don’t remember exactly how it all came about, but suddenly I was aware of His physical presence in the room! Now the presence of the Holy Spirit is one thing--a generalized sense of the Presence of God--when you know He is there, hearing everything you say, with you in every sense of the word. But this was different. This was the personal presence of Jesus, there with me in the total darkness. I knew exactly where He was, in the opposite corner of the room. And this was the strange thing: I could sense Him there surrounded with intense brightness, but I couldn’t see anything with my physical eyes. Even with my spiritual eyes I couldn’t see Him or the light, just sense His awesome Presence radiating glorious light.
Because I know it’s never about me, but always about Him, I asked Him trepidatiously what was on His heart, inviting Him to speak, waiting for His Word to come forth, fearful because here I was in a tiny room with the all-glorious God of the universe from whom nothing was hidden. Yet beyond the fear, somewhere deep within my “natural man,” I was wondering what one thing--out of all the things in the universe He could talk about--would be the uppermost thought in Jesus’ mind that night? Lost souls? My trip to Atlanta? The state of the church? My own state? The end times? Coming judgments…? What?
I had only a moment to wonder, as thoughts of the cross flooded my mind and soon I was engrossed in the story of the cross coming from the heart of my Lord—the suffering, the agony, the total victory it brought…. When it was over I was left thinking, “No matter how many things and how many times I’ve heard about the cross, it still is the most powerful doctrine in the church. No wonder Jesus is thinking about it this night.”

Colossians 2:13 … [God] forgave us all our sins, 14 having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

1 Corinthians 2:8 [NIV]—None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

That remains one of the greatest and most precious times Jesus has come to me. To have the Lord of the universe there in the room with me and talking to me... there really is no way to adequately describe it!