On Being Open to the Unexpected

On Being Open to the Unexpected
Psalm 113-114

In commenting on Psalm 108, I spoke of a friend’s Pentecostal church that seemed to have no more expectation of God’s acting than evangelical or mainline churches do. But yesterday I sat in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room reading a book recommended to me by my boss (so obviously I had to read it), a book by James Smith with the provocative title Thinking in Tongues (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010). One chapter begins with the testimony a woman gave in a service to the way she and her husband had been trying for a baby for eight years and had become frustrated and hopeless and angry with God. But the previous month the women in her Bible study group had laid hands on her and prayed for her. She was too tired to believe that the stories of women such as Hannah could become her story, and she didn’t think much about the event afterwards. But she was now pregnant...