We were in the final day of our first Spiritual Dynamics Conference. Donald Mostrom, author from New England, had come to share his life with us. We were soaked by a sudden downpour as we approached the barn where we had set up old desk chairs, a podium, a small sound system scrounged from friends. It had been raining and now it was pouring rain. I was quite discouraged as I walked with our guest who was ready to deliver his last message of the weekend. However, Dr. Mostrom was exhilarated. “Praise the Lord,” he shouted as we walked up the hill to the barn that Sunday morning, “the drought is over!!!!” I looked at him in disbelief, but also relief.
Forty to sixty guests had come to spend the weekend. Some had stayed in town, others at the farm in tents or in the granary where, after sweeping and hosing it down, we had set up cots. Dr. Mostrom, had the privilege of sleeping in the farmhouse in Sara’s bedroom while she bedded on the floor of our bedroom.
After all our careful planning and preparation for this conference, it had rained the whole weekend. We had planned some exciting and fun times, such as a trail hike, Frisbee golf in the pasture, a volley ball game in the front yard. But for most of the weekend we huddled in the barn.
We also were limited in what we could do in the barn. At this point in our history, there was no kitchen in the barn, so we supplied all of the meals from the farmhouse kitchen. The young families who attended the conference had small children, and we had carefully planned child care for them in the living room of the farm-house. The bathroom in the basement served as the main bathroom for the conference. In fact, the entire tiny house had become an extension of the conference.
By Saturday morning, we were almost wading in mud in the kitchen, mud that was dragged in by all of the necessary traffic. By noon of the second day the basement had flooded. From the bottom of the steps to the bathroom, we had set up an improvised “bridge” created from an old wooden ironing board that had been stored in the basement. (Creativity flourishes when there are few alternatives.) The living room nursery was cluttered and dirty, but dry.
Don Mostrom, the author of Intimacy with God (1983), had been invited to be our first guest speaker for several reasons. Our first year together we had studied The Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal by Richard Lovelace. We were challenged. As we read Lovelace’s acknowledgments, we discovered that a certain man, Don Mostrom, had been one of Lovelace’s primary mentors. After the Bascom family traveled to New England to attend a Peniel Bible Conference, they came back renewed, refreshed, and desiring to hear more from Don Mostrom who had been the key-note speaker. We were thrilled when this man from the East Coast agreed to come to our poor, humble farm to join us for a weekend and share his thoughts from a book that he was working on at the time, Spiritual Privileges You Didn’t Know Were Yours.
We were deluged that weekend, but not only with rain. We had found joy in working together as a young community. We had studied together, planned together, and were now working out the individual gifts of each member. From cooking to nursery, from creating song sheets to leading the singing, from registration to clean-up, we each used our gifts. Our children had been assigned their own important tasks: Derrick was to park cars, Dan and Derrick created the Frisbee golf course and blazed the trails for hiking; Sara at seven years old was appointed “the chief smiler”which she did with total sincerity. And together, our community had been sitting at the feet of a spiritual giant as he challenged us and encouraged us with spiritual blessings from God’s heart.
It is not always in the physical comfort of our surroundings that we find the presence of God. He was there as we waded to the bathroom, as we mopped the muddy kitchen floor, as we sat huddled in the barn instead of doing all of the fun activities we had planned. Grace and abundant joy in the presence of the others who had gathered with us. This was an unwrapping of his presence in community. Yes, in the midst of the mundane the sun was shining. Thus, the exclamation “Praise the Lord, the drought is over,” was the capstone that crowned our weekend.
