Page 16 - eBook Living Water 2

I couldn’t wait for graduation. My grades had deteriorated
from high honor roll as a freshman to being so low that I barely
graduated. It was amazing that I was accepted into college. I really
didn’t want to go, but felt that it was what I should do; so many others
were and my parents always expected us to do so. I was quickly
sliding down a slippery slope of unreality and confusion and it felt
like I might not make it in life. So, at my pleading, in order to
continue getting what felt like “square box” me through the round
holes of life, Dad sent me to see a psychiatrist he knew. The doctor
gave me a prescription for the anti-anxiety drug Milltown.

2 A Spiritual Experience

My first spiritual experience was when I was about eight years
old. I wouldn’t have been able to describe it in those words then, but
now I can, because it vividly lives on in my memory as an awareness
of something beyond the world around me.

I was sitting next to my parents in a pew of our crowded
Presbyterian Church during a Sunday morning service. It was an
early nineteenth century green granite building with huge stained
glass windows and a pipe organ reaching high to the cathedral ceiling.
For little girl me, it seemed like an enchanted castle.

As the organ began playing a hymn, the powerful sounds from
its pipes seemed to penetrate through to a place inside of me that lit
up and “hurt good”. I began to cry but the tears weren’t my usual
ones, like when my brother had teased me. These were tears that
seemed to have sparkles and rainbows in them. Something seemed
present that enveloped the room, was beyond the room, and yet was
all inside me, too. As I looked around, it was obvious that no one else
was crying. I just saw stoic faces. So, feeling rather awkward, I
quickly brushed away the tears.
I didn’t share about that experience with anyone. However,
there were to be other extraordinary spiritual experiences I’d have