Cross bros: passion for God
BROTHERS Gideon and Jake Clark have both had a life-changing experience. They tell the mJa blog their story.
“My friend prayed for me and I started crying – really crying and crying and crying. And he hugged me and I started crying again and he was crying too.” For 22-year-old Gideon Clark it was a break-through moment. Gideon – and his 20-year-old brother, Jake – were brought up in a Christian family. But now Gideon had experienced God for himself.
The brothers’ parents are in the Jesus Army, and they grew up in a large shared house with many different kinds of people. But their childhood memories are much like many other happy, average kids – and mixed with a lot of laughter.
“Apparently I weed in a Noah’s Ark my dad made me” confesses Gideon. “Things like that have affected me” he adds, mock serious. He describes his experience of God: “It was deep and – unlike me. Tears and snotty nose just aren’t me! I wasn’t expecting to cry. I’d seen people have ‘shaky-shaky, laughy-laughy, bouncy-bouncy’ experiences. That isn’t very ‘me’ either, but I guess I was open to something like that. But this was different. It was uncontrollable.
“I thought about it a lot later. If God’s Spirit is inside you – His amazingly clean Spirit – if He touches you even the slightest bit, because human nature is so impure, you can’t help it – the slightest touch of God is over-powering.”
Unlike Gideon who had always been “quietly interested” in faith, Jake has had a more colourful, zigzagging journey into belief. He says he went through some “rebellion” in his early teens. (“You were drinking at 12!” Gideon blurts out.)
Around the age of 15, however, Jake was very affected when he saw, at close range, someone being powerfully freed by prayer: “Over the years I’d seen and heard some pretty real stuff” says Jake “but this time – wow. Something started to click.”
Days later, in an R.E. lesson at school, he found himself telling his mate, Perry, about what he’d seen. He also started to learn the guitar and sing Jesus songs.
Most exciting of all for Jake, his friend Perry started finding faith for himself.
“The first time that I ever prayed for anybody was the time I prayed for Perry” bubbles Jake, adding “It was really weird for me. I was laughing as I was praying, but I put my hand on his head.” Jake was learning how to be a Christian and a leader – all at once.
Then at another large Jesus event, Jake, Perry and some other friends had a powerful experience of God when they were prayed for: “We went down like a ton of bricks. It was really powerful; there were about four of us there and we were shaking and there were volts going through our hands” (what Gideon describes as a ‘shaky-shaky, laughy-laughy, bouncy-bouncy’ experience).
Now Gideon and Jake, together with Perry and others, are part of a growing youth movement of those who have experienced the power of God – for real.
Jake’s infectious enthusiasm bubbles over as he talks about his many dreams of many young people getting on board, and the vision of Christian faith spreading “bang, bang, bang, bang”.
Gideon’s dreams are expressed more quietly but run just as deep: “I don’t want to complicate things.” He smiles. “It’s basically whatever God wants…”
