Everyday SupernaturalSample

Everyday Supernatural

It’s vital to understand this if we want to live everyday supernatural lives. The supernatural life isn’t one where we wander around with pumped-up confidence throwing power bombs at people. If it were, only a few people could ever live it. Instead, it is a life available to anyone. All we need to do is depend on God, trusting that his power can work in our vulnerability.

Our friend Ants Watts tells a story about his little girl Hannah that illustrates how this works. Ants came home one evening, and Hannah came running up to him, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, can we build a fire?” Ants agreed, and so they gathered all the bits of wood and paper they needed and arranged them in the fireplace. Once they’d lit it, Hannah knew they needed to blow on the fire to help it catch. She knelt down, put her face near the fire and began to blow. The sound was like someone blowing a raspberry. Ants said so much dribble came out of her mouth he was sure more water went on the fire than oxygen. But after a few minutes the fire suddenly caught and began to spread. Hannah turned, beaming, to her dad and said, “I did it, Daddy! I did it!” “Well done!” he responded. “You did do it, you clever girl!”

What Hannah didn’t see was that whilst she was kneeling down blowing a wet raspberry at the fire, her daddy was crouching next to her. Every time she blew, Ants was taking a deep breath and blowing on the fire from behind her. She turned in delight at what she’d accomplished, not knowing that her daddy had been helping her all along.

We love what that father-daughter moment illustrates about how the everyday supernatural life works. Even the “strongest” among us will only ever achieve the equivalent of a wet raspberry. But our Father is behind us. As we step out he breathes out the wind of his Holy Spirit, and fires begin to catch. Weakness is the way. This means no lack of qualifications, no lack of gifting, no lack of fashion sense can ever get in the way of God working through us. It means that you are in!

If God delights to use the weak, then it means he delights to use you and he delights to use us. God wants to pour his treasure into your cracked pot. He wants to use you—even when you feel weak, broken, vulnerable, fearful and confused—to bring him glory.