We are heading into some of the most amazing times we have ever or will ever experience during this present age on earth. I realize that the news in this country and indeed almost every country is negative and gives little promise of turning around—according to worldly reports. But, let me share with you a pattern that I am beginning to see emerge. That is one of the gifts of being older. If you live long enough you have seen it all—well, maybe not all—but a goodly portion of it.

So—a bit of personal chronology: I graduated from high school in 1954, from college in 1958, and then, attended the Royal Academy in London. By l960, I was starving in New York—like any hopeful person in their early twenties that had come to that humongous city set to live by the “arts”. Most of the fifteen years I lived in New York City were spent in the West Village—and most of that, on West 11th street.

I arrived at the birth of an extremely volatile decade—the 1960s. I was there for its meteoric rise and its sad decay into drugs, irresponsibility and violence. Dustin Hoffman, who lived in the next block on 11th street, had to move because a group was making bombs in the basement right next door. The materials exploded destroying the brownstone. My mother called from my home in Texas begging me to “get out of there.” “Oh, mother,” I answered naively, “that wasn’t even on our block.” (You can tell I was in my twenties.) Then another group bombed and destroyed a very old, historic church a block away in the other direction.

There were demonstrations, deaths from overdoses and groups with exotic names and violent agendas.

BUT at the same time—in the crypt-like chapel of a church in Houston—two ministers and ten members of a cavernous and failing church prayed daily and birthed the Charismatic Revival. Before that time, a few individuals in the main line churches had been “baptized in the Holy Spirit”, but the Redeemer in Houston burst into church-wide revival that spread like wildfire and touched the nations.

The two came at the same time. With all of the drugs and danger and unrest on the one hand, the Spirit of the Living God was exploding with a worldwide move of His Spirit on the other. It is easy to hear and see that which the enemy is accelerating now throughout the world. It may take a little longer to experience the extraordinary, consuming fire of His Spirit which—somewhere, I know—already has burst into flame. Most people thought the Charismatic revival began in the l970s because that is when it had spread to more of the nations.

Today I was talking to a friend who lives in Mobile, Alabama. She told me of several accidental explosions on a barge in Mobile Bay. (By the way, the original name for that body of water was BAY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.) This is one more sign that joins the others. We are on the verge of a world-wide explosion of the Holy Spirit.

Look up, brethren. He is coming!!!!!!!!!!!