A short item out of a diocesan paper in New Jersey has stayed with me. On September 26, a Catholic community gathered at Saints Peter and Paul Parish in Turnersville for what they called a Charismatic Prayer Day. The title they gave the gathering was simple and unembarrassed: Encounter with the Holy Spirit.
I don't know how many walked through those doors. I don't know what happened in the room. What I keep turning over is something that comes well before any of that: somebody had to pick a date. Somebody had to find a Saturday, reserve a building, print something, tell people. Somebody had to decide that meeting with the Holy Spirit was worth putting on a calendar the way you'd put down a dentist appointment or a grandchild's ball game.
That sounds almost too ordinary to mention. I think it is the whole thing.
An appointment, and then a surprise
There is a verse in Acts that I used to read straight past on my way to the good part. "Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour" (Acts 3:1). Three in the afternoon. A fixed time. That prayer hour had been on the Jewish calendar since long before either man was born, and it would have been on the calendar whether they felt like it or not.
So two men walk up the steps to keep a standing appointment, and on the way they pass a man who cannot walk, carried to the gate every single day to beg. Peter looks at him. "I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" And Luke tells us the man went in with them, "walking and leaping and praising God" (Acts 3:6, 8).
Notice what they were not doing. Peter and John were not headed to a healing service. There was no advertised encounter. They were going to the three o'clock prayer, the same as yesterday. The scheduled thing was routine. The unscheduled thing was glory.
The Spirit is not tame, and He is not absent
Nobody summons God by booking a room. The Holy Spirit is a Person, not a utility, and Jesus said plainly that the wind blows where it wishes. We don't manufacture His presence with good planning and a decent sound system.
But here is the other half, and it is just as true: God meets people who show up. Over and over in Scripture, the ordinary obedience of being in the place at the time is the setting where heaven does something nobody arranged. That man at the gate had been carried past that doorway daily for years. The day it happened was not a day he had circled on anything. It was a day two men kept an appointment.
I want to say this carefully, because some of you reading have been showing up for a long time and the thing you've been asking for has not moved. You have prayed over a body that is still sick, a marriage that is still cold, a child who still won't come home. Peter did not empty that gate of every beggar sitting there, and Scripture never pretends otherwise. Faithfulness is not a lever you pull. If you came away from a prayer meeting with nothing visible in your hands, you were not doing it wrong, and you are not less loved. You were standing where God has promised to be found, and that is never wasted ground.
Put it on the calendar
So I am not the least bit apologetic about a plain, unglamorous line on a church schedule. Next Tuesday, the 27th, at eleven in the morning, we will gather here at Outpouring to pray. There is nothing dramatic about eleven o'clock on a Tuesday. It is a working hour in a small town in West Michigan. But it is an hour of prayer, and I have come to believe those hours are where the Spirit does a great deal of His quietest and most surprising work — healing we didn't schedule, courage we didn't feel on the drive over, a word for somebody that lands square in a wound nobody at church knew about.
A parish in New Jersey set aside a day and called it an encounter. Peter and John set aside an afternoon and called it the ninth hour. Both are the same posture: we are going to be in the room, and we expect the living God to be there before us.
He is. That is the hope underneath all of it. The name Peter had nothing else to offer — Jesus Christ of Nazareth — is still the name under which the Spirit moves among ordinary people on ordinary Tuesdays. Christ has not stepped back from His church. Pick the hour. Show up. He keeps His appointments better than we keep ours.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.