One of the first things I did after being baptised in the Holy Spirit in 1976 was to ask my Parish Priest what parish task he found most difficult to cover. His answer was “finding someone to bring the eight Catholics to the 11.00 a.m. Sunday Mass from the local home for people with cerebral palsy”. I immediately offered to take this on and did it for about three years – which I really enjoyed! I also did other things in the parish, and when a new Parish Council was formed, I was appointed Chairman.
At the time I was working as the Managing Director for the UK sales and marketing subsidiary of a Swedish forest products company, and I decided to make myself available to offer advice privately to those working for me. So I started leaving my office door open whenever I was not doing anything confidential. The first day I did this, a young employee came in to tell me she was struggling to cope with an accident to a much-loved pet.
A few days later another employee came to tell me he was having a relationship problem – how should he handle this? The open door had certainly improved my accessibility and this continued to increase over the years.
Perhaps the most interesting thing was that when I went to Sweden with members of staff to visit our paper mills, we always travelled around by coach, and I soon discovered that I needed to sit on the back seat of the coach because I always had a number of people coming to talk to me about issues in their lives. I found it fascinating that my new openness to the Holy Spirit immediately meant that outside church circles people felt something special and started coming to me to discuss their personal problems. This continued for many years.
At the same time, of course, I was very active in my local church, which led to church involvement nationally and internationally. I found myself speaking at church events all over the world, and invited to attend Pope John Paul II’s private Mass in his Vatican apartment whenever I was in Rome. After Mass we would always chat for a few minutes, and we got to know each other quite well.
Baptism in the Holy Spirit completely transforms every area of our lives and equips us to handle whatever situations the Lord lays before us.
J. Charles Whitehead, KSG.
