As a young 19-year-old in the middle of the Jesus Movement, I was like so many other young people at that time.  We were all searching for something.  

The summer of 1969 was an unusual time in the culture of the United States.  Everything was changing. God was reaching out and touching thousands of young men and women, and I was one of them.

I couldn’t get enough of the Bible and fellowship.  I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and remember going to Bible studies in coffeehouses, attending church services at places like Peninsula Bible Church, where I sat with hundreds of other young people in standing-room-only crowds, listening to Ray Stedman preach. 

One of these journeys took a friend and me to Bethany Bible College in Scotts Valley, California.  Bethany was hosting a public conference.  A friend and I got into my VW Bug and drove to Scotts Valley.

When we stepped into the auditorium, it was packed wall-to-wall.  Young people with long hair and sandals were standing around the perimeter of the main seating area. My friend and I found a place to stand against the back wall of the auditorium. 

I grew up in a very conservative church.  The feeling I was having in this gathering was a freedom I had never experienced before.  It was very strange and a bit uncomfortable.  It was a very different experience for me, but I knew it was right and good. Nothing was out of order.  What I was feeling for the first time was the manifest presence of God being welcomed in a public gathering. I saw the Holy Spirit moving during worship in ways I had never seen before.  I was strangely drawn to this new and unfamiliar work of the Spirit.

The people conducting the service sat in rows of chairs on the platform.  I don’t recall who they were, but as a 19-year-old, I could tell these were important people who were leading the meeting.

About halfway through worship, one of the men sitting on the platform raised his head and looked past the platform, scanning the audience.  I watched him as he scanned the crowd. He stopped and looked in our direction. I thought nothing of it, thinking he could be looking at a hundred other people who were standing along the back wall.

I watched as the man stood from his chair and walked through the worship team and down onto the main floor.  He began walking in my direction. It was still impossible to think he was coming to me, but that was about to change.  As he continued in my direction, it was becoming more and more obvious he was moving toward me.  This was confirmed when he was about ten feet away and locked his eyes with mine as he closed the remaining steps between us.

The man looked like a grandfather.  He was wearing a suit and tie and carried a blend of authority and gentleness.  He came and stood directly in front of me.  Then he did something that made me really uncomfortable.  He put his arms on my shoulders and pulled me close. He then began to speak into my ear in a language I had never heard before.  I would later come to know this heavenly language of tongues in a very personal way.  On that day, the tongues the man spoke into my ear were as strange as the meeting that was taking place.

The man spoke for only a few seconds, then stopped. He pulled away from me and looked into my eyes for another moment.  I knew something holy had just happened, but I was not sure what.  The meeting went on, and later that evening, I drove back to my parents’ home in Los Gatos, still pondering what had happened.

I had parked that experience in the back of my mind and forgot about it.  Ten years later, Jesus would visit me in the middle of the night, supernaturally transforming my life forever. Within weeks of that experience, the Lord took me back to the time when I was nineteen and attending the Bethany conference. The Lord said, “I am bringing the interpretation of the words the man spoke into your ear.  Your life will become a living interpretation of what was spoken to you by My Spirit.”