On keeping the shoes apart

The other day my best friend made me choke on my cappuccino. He was telling me about a person who came to see him; her story contained numerous spirits, some strange beverages, and a visit to a psychic among other ill-advised appointments. ‘You know Andrew,’ he said, ‘I wanted to tell her, you’re not possessed, you’re just crazy’. (The noun ‘crazy’ was actually prefaced by a wonderfully colourful hyphenated word that gives full expression to the sentiment, a word related to the faecal matter of a cave-dwelling mammal). All ministers have these moments when, while listening to some far-fetched tale told by a person who seems to have a tentative grasp on reality, you wonder, 'Is this not all just nonsense?' I once counseled a young girl. Her mother was particularly drawn to the supernatural. She saw things. Experienced things. Got knocked over regularly and not because she had an inner-ear infection or because she struggled with right turns. No. The girl, with great shame, laughed when she told me about a ‘spiritual episode’ her mother experienced; she found her mom lying face down on the floor ‘overcome by the Spirit’. Her mother was prone to being 'overcome in the Spirit'. The girl’s observation though was not so much with her mother but with her mother’s shoes, which were perfectly placed next to each other, a foot away from her now recovering mom. The point is, for credibility, if you are overcome by the Spirit, your shoes should not be found together. The Spirit has never really cared for that level of house-keeping; you can’t be slain in the Spirit and still have time to polish the fine China on the way down. I’m not saying hard-to-understand spiritual stuff doesn’t happen - heck, it happens to me – but there is some naughty other stuff that happens as well, that is a lot more manipulative. So, next time you are ‘overcome’ throw your shoes in different directions or don’t go see my friend, he might just call it as he sees it.