“Anyone who wants a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit, come on up.”

My pastor had just finished teaching us two complimentary paradigms of the filling of the Holy Ghost: Dr. Luke’s versus that of the “Hebrew of Hebrews” Paul’s viewpoint of power.

It was either March or April of 2002, two years after I’d walked to the front of the smaller sanctuary, been dunked backwards in the baptismal pool, had Satan smile at me in a nightmare and moved on to Cali.

Like Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, I went back to Ohio, but my city wasn’t gone.

By then our church members had moved into a sprawling sanctuary with high ceilings adorned with decorative, colorful flags waving in the breeze from at least one hundred different countries whose residents had ordered tapes from the ministry.

I wanted in…

I was convinced.

I’d heard enough proof and read enough Scripture references about the Holy Spirit’s effect on people, coming to live with us not only when we’ve accepted Christ as Savior, but again and again at special times, for special reasons, with special power.

I was ready for more.

Effusive beams of sunlight shone into the church, pressing through the narthex like a longtime member behind me as I stepped into the aisle.

Hindsight reveals nature replicating life.

The Earth’s 23-degree tilted axis leaned closer to brilliant solar light that melted the existing vestiges of snow away like when Aslan the great lion brought summer back to Narnia and defeated the Ice Queen in The Chronicles of Narnia – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

My life, too, was heating up.

After two miscarriages, I now had my second healthy baby in my tummy — about two months in utero — and felt like I was on the precipice of being published.

Hollywood dreamin’

As I walked down the lavender-carpeted aisle with iridescent light at my back, my purse flounced against my A-line wrap dress.

I saw a man sitting close to a woman turn to look as I walked.

Their shoulders were framed by the wooden pews (that would later be replaced by theater-style seating) they remained seated against.

Their faces and expressions spelled apprehension.

Their whispers all but screamed: I’m not going up there…

I begged inside my own head when I reached the front of the Great Worship Center.

God, please let me win the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship Award.

God, please let me win the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship Award.

I waited with a small group of about 20 people who’d gathered at the front.

We looked up a few feet above to our pastor, who stood behind a podium close by on the stage.

It had been a full year since I’d pleaded with a nurse who’d leaned closer to hear me whisper “…please, cut me…” in a Marin General Hospital maternity room overlooking hilly Greenbrae, California.

Back then, I was ready to end the 4-hour agony of trying to push my son out of my body — and expelling everything except him out of me till the 7 o’clock evening hour he arrived.

Waiting for the gravy train…

And there I was begging once more, with a little girl in my womb, a zygote turned embryo about 10 weeks old resting inside.

Having had my novel and magazine writing dreams turned into nightmares, I now wanted to be one of the screenwriters recognized for their fine quality writing.

I longed to be a Nicholl Fellow, one of five winners annually rewarded with $30,000 each and Hollywood buzz. Which script was I praying would win?

It couldn’t have been the Coldwater Canyon script I’d penned and submitted all over Hollywood pre-2001.

That was a melodramatic update of Sunset Boulevard that I’d envisioned with a “so money” thin and handsome Swingers-era Vince Vaughn in William Holden‘s desperate writer role.

Susan Sarandon, whose face I’d taped over Gloria Swanson’s on the VHS cover, would star as the famous Norma Desmond cougar.

Jennifer Love Hewitt (before the TMZ fat-photo controversy) would be the cute “new car smell” having Betty Schaefer who steals the hack writer out of the creepy mansion, and unwittingly helps send him to a watery grave.

No, before I even left California, Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber‘s people had sent me a cease and desist letter for what they deemed wasn’t really an “updated version” at all, claiming I had infringed upon a story that Weber owned the rights to.

Obviously my marketing ploy worked, but my copyrights obtaining job, not so much.

So I ceased.

And desisted.

Black Woman’s Burden

Maybe in the year since the move that landed us back in Ohio by February 2002, I’d penned another screenplay that had put Oscar-statue stars in my eyes.

Perhaps — if I’d written any new screenplay by then — it was better than the Parallax movie I’d completed back in 1993.

In that movie-in-my-head — akin to Wendy Williams’ “friend in my head” imaginations — a white woman awakens one day to find African-Americans have always been the richer majority.

Well into writing and rewriting the treatment, replete with its Chicago setting, character slang and violent opening scene imagery of my main character getting clobbered on the head — I found out about John Travolta’s White Man’s Burden.

Still in development, White Man’s Burden revolved around a similar “high concept” hook that took the wind out of my sails.

Deflated, I kept on writing.

But if I did summon the ever-present writer’s hope to fill another 120 pages and submit it to the Academy, the title escapes me.

Thwarted by my screenplay efforts, I stood begging God for some recognition and outward success.

All of my magazine article publishing efforts had failed at that point, as well as my self-publishing venture with a salacious novel called Seducing God.

Please let me win the $30,000, I begged from within.

“Worship Him!”

Please let me win the $30,000, I begged from within.

“Worship Him!” our diminutive pastor-turned-bishop called out from above.

I may have jumped imperceptibly, as if he’d read my selfish petitions.

Okay, God, you can do with me what you want, I relented.

Okay, God, you can do with me what you want, I relented.

It was as if the key to an ignition had been turned.

A few feet behind the man of God at his podium, a figure began to come into focus on this side of the ether.

I didn’t see his face…

I didn’t see his hands…

I didn’t see any flesh…

…but as if ethereal snow from a heavenly channel, something began to form, both there and not there.

But He was un-mis-tak-able.

He wore a brilliant, resplendent robe in a color not of this world.

Not necessarily gold.

Not really white, but very apparent.

And I could no longer stand in its presence.

“Every knee shall bow…“

My legs shook in the Presence of the wonderment above and to my right.

I thought of the delicate life in my body.

What if I fell?

It felt my knees give way, like in ancient days.

I watched my own right hand reach for shoulder of the hefty man on my right — as if recording a final flash of memory before being put under an omnipotent general anesthesia.

He wore a knock-off cheaper version of one of those red and yellow multi-colored sweaters that Bill Cosby made famous.

In a split second, I drew my hand back.

I knew I didn’t need him.

I must’ve landed straight on my knees, without my hands bracing me, but there was no pain.

“It is yours…”

It was only a small portion of his power — I could tell — but it was the most powerful thing I have ever felt on this earth.

It was decidedly male, perhaps an angel of the Lord, like Gabriel.

But deep in my gut I know it was Jesus energy…a theophany or Christophany.

It was the Messiah.

And He was so holy.

I cried racking sobs as I was made aware of how dirty I was before Him.

The thuggish young dude to my left — all tall and festooned in baggy jeans, a t-shirt and hip hop gear (I seem to remember silver chains like a dog collar or something on his waist) — was down on his “prayer bones” (as my GranRuby used to call them) as well sobbing next to me, bravado facade gone.

Whatever was standing guard behind Bishop, as if He approved enough of the church or situation or our seeking to grace us and stand there, was pure and otherworldly.

A touch of heaven.

We stood, eventually.

I was shocked to see the rotund Cosby-sweater guy splayed flat on the floor, his belly round and full.

I hadn’t heard a thing. And he was a good 250.

I fiddled nervously like my mother would have done in my purse and handed the “thuggish ruggish” guy next to me a tissue, “embarrassed by the crowd” at my display of emotion.

Later, Grief Recovery classes would teach me not to proffer tissue and hand pats and hugs to stem the flow of tears, but that day, I didn’t know.

I wiped my own tears with Kleenex.

Bishop descended the stairs with his armor bearer and crossed oil onto foreheads as he repeated “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

I said to myself, Oh, I already received Him all right.

I turned and heard three words rise from my unction-receiving gut space travel up to my inner ear and brain:

“It is yours.”

Such a distinctive, specific, not-necessarily modern way of speaking — I knew the thought wasn’t from me.

I didn’t even know those specific words were in the Bible. In years to come I would delight in the places and manner ADONAI used them in Scripture:

“You will enjoy the wealth of the nations
And be proud that it is yours.” Isaiah 61:6b

And there again in 1 Corinthians 3:21-23, in heaven-inspired, keep-your-head-on-straight language that reminds me of the worldly “The World is Yours” writing Scarface had emblazoned on his lowly cocaine throne — but this edict came down as a good and perfect gift from above:

I don’t want to hear any of you bragging about yourself or anyone else. Everything is already yours as a gift—Paul, Apollos, Peter, the world, life, death, the present, the future—all of it is yours, and you are privileged to be in union with Christ, who is in union with God.

My pleas for a screenwriting fellowship were but an afterthought in the wake of what I’d just been through, but I was so happy to hear that affirmation after first beseeching, then yielding to our Father.

Mere months from that day, I would begin garnering some of the national magazine bylines I’d been seeking since right after college, more than a decade before that pivotal day.

But what exactly was mine?

The Nicholl’s Fellowship, deeper writing desires or the wants behind the wishes that I really craved underneath it all?

How and why did I “get religion” (imbued with such a strong power for a special purpose) like my grandmother said she sought so many decades before her death?

And how exactly would it change my life and affect my writing career?

The next seven years would surely unveil more of the unexpected winding plot lines of my life’s screenplay…