Help From The Helper: The Holy Spirit At Work In An Ordinary Life

By ALICE M. DITZLER

These essays come from encounters with a silent HELPER, whom as a child, I couldn't identify. In 1953, I was a nearly deaf child placed in first grade in a public school where I sank like a rock and sank for eight years. At home, I was living with an un-diagnosed Bipolar mother, and in school, sent to Special Education. When I encountered Jesus

• Language: English
• Publisher: Personal On my own
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088249185

Book preview

Help

From The

Helper

The Holy Spirit At Work In An Ordinary Life

Alice M. Ditzler

Copyright © 2023 by

Alice M. Ditzler

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the author.

ISBN: 979-8-218-26148-1

Printed in the United States of America

IT IS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE THAT I GO AWAY BECAUSE IF I DO NOT GO AWAY, THE HELPER WILL NOT COME TO YOU, BUT IF I DO GO AWAY, I WILL SEND HIM TO YOU.

JOHN 16:7

The difference between an Angel and the Holy Spirit is that the Angel is a Celestial Messenger of God. The Holy Spirit is a manifestation of God and not another agent. It is the role He plays when He dwells in the Believer’s temple, (his body) and when He interacts with humanity.

- Damon Nailer

God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,

He plants His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.

You fearful Saints fresh courage take, the clouds you so much dread,

Are big with mercy and shall break with blessings on your head.

His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour,

The bud may have a bitter taste but sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan His work in vain.

God is His own interpreter and He will make it plain.

William Cowper

For:

Nolan Abel, Abram Thomas, Isaac Zackery, Tommy John and Alanna Rae

"Be strong and courageous!

Do not tremble or be dismayed,

For the Lord your God is with you

Wherever you go."

-Joshua 1:9

The Mystery

It’s fall of 1953. Dad and I are standing on the sidewalk down in front of the rented red brick, row-house in Philadelphia. He holds a square black box. Behind me, mom sits on the top-stone step; on her lap is my four-month-old baby brother. Mom looks very tired. Behind her is the walkway leading back to the narrow house. Next to her sits my five-year-old brother displaying the identical Jack-O-Lantern gap of a smile as mine. We are both missing a prominent front tooth. The new belted, plaid dress accentuates my ever-expanding, six-year-old waistline. I’m also wearing brand new black and white saddle shoes. On this memorable (in more ways than one,) first day of first grade, I can hardly wait to ride the big yellow bus and plan to arrive back home at 3 p.m. reading large books.

In addition to all this finery, I also possess a stunning new hairdo. The evening before, mom spent an hour twisting very small sections of my already unruly, curly hair into wet snail-shaped pin-curls. This morning, with hair all dry and unfurled, she has found the task of arranging it a bit of a challenge. When presented with a hand mirror, I see several large, completely uncombable masses protruding from odd angles on my head, a look that leans more toward Harpo Marx, than I might have hoped. However, uninitiated into the world of beauty, what do I know? My five-year-old brother remains unimpressed with the new me. The big yellow school bus rounds the corner and screeches to a halt, then he is speechless with admiration. With two fingers, I shyly hold out the left side of my plaid skirt and smile. CLICK, goes Dad’s Brownie and the moment is captured for posterity.

At six, with a completely unaddressed issue of a major hearing loss, giving me a total of ten percent hearing in one ear only, little do I know that this will be the last day I will ever again be excited about going to school and not until fifth grade will my parents be called in about taking me to a specialist. Four years and three surgeries later, by the end of eighth grade, I begin to hear a little more. But on this first day, little do I know years of sheer terror, constant failure and subsequent outrageous punishments will commence before the day is over. The mystery that consumes my life begins. However, a second mystery begins; I’m being seriously and silently helped, from time to time, but by whom??

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Table of Contents

1 The Point

2 The Barrette

3 The Baby Jesus

4 The Ballplayer

5 The Cloud

6 The Calling

7 The Scholar

8 The Lost Deer

9 The Hope

10 The Trampoline

11 The Visitor

12 The Party

13 The Recital

14 The Teacher Georgia On My Mind

15 The Substance Of Things Hoped For

16 The Christmas Memory

17 The Old Hymn

18 The New Emperor’s New Clothes

19 The Conclusion

Testimonials

Brief Biographical Notes

1

The Point

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go.

-Psalm 32:8

In 1975, the great movie produced by Billy Graham’s, World Wide Pictures, THE HIDING PLACE, became a blockbuster hit and drew not only Christians but millions of people from all walks of life. In one of the first scenes, 80-year-old Casper Ten Boom, a Dutch watch-maker, his daughters, Corrie and Betsie, and his son Willem are in their parlor in Haarlem, Holland, with Jan Schmidt (a code name for any man working with the Dutch Underground). Both Jan Schmidt and Willem, a Dutch pastor, are part of the Underground and are very concerned because a few days earlier, both of Willem’s sisters, with his father’s approval had taken in and hidden a Jewish baby. Betsie says, But, we know people who will help us! Why, we know half of Haarlem!

Jan Schmidt, a leader in the underground says, My dear lady! Knowing them is one thing! Knowing their political affiliations, is quite another. Corrie, defiantly answers, But God knows! And I know what He told me!

I was twenty-four when I first saw their true story of amazing courage and faith and that one scene was a years-long, awaited confirmation over the issue of hearing from God in our day and age! For many years I had wondered if it was God I was hearing from (silently, never audibly,) but the pastor in our church, which I loved, was adamant that God did not speak to people in our days!

If you want to know what God has to say, read the Bible, our pastor said repeatedly! Of course, reading the Bible comes first, but My confusion was in the fact that while my life had been beyond impossible, someone had been helping me since I was six! If that silent help did not come from God, then from where? It was a help I never spoke of to anyone. I wasn’t about to stand up against a pastor I greatly respected, the whole Elder Board and my own father and contradict them. Six decades later, the issue of hearing from God, has been resolved many times over, through a variety of ways.

I’ve been given dreams so real (which showed me things to come) that I was surprised to wake up because I thought I was awake.

At eight, I was alone, crying in my bedroom following a serious whipping because of a bad report card (I was nearly deaf and was failing everything all the time). Suddenly, completely random words came, so strongly and silently that I felt it had to be God. In those few words, I learned of something that would happen years later. Fifty years passed and I found myself right in the middle of that exact exciting venture -the very thing I was told about as a child.

There have been waking visions, when questions have been answered through a picture that just came to my mind, that had nothing to do with where I was or what I was doing; again, serious questions were immediately answered.

At the age of seven, I asked Jesus to come and live in my heart at a time when my life was completely impossible. Every day, for years, was an incomprehensible nightmare due to an undiagnosed and unaddressed, significant hearing disorder, but by learning about Him through the flannel-board stories in Sunday School and following the words in the hymnal as the congregation sang, I came to understand that there was a God who loved me and that His Son, Jesus, loved little children and had a wonderful gift for fixing people when something was wrong. At six and seven, I knew there was something very wrong with me but what? It was a total mystery.

The Point, of this book is to show some of the ways God’s Holy Spirit, (The Helper) can and does move in the lives of those who love Him and call Him Lord. Recently I was backing myself up into a Pity-Party, and wondering (again,) how so much could have gone so outrageously wrong from the very beginning of my young life. Yes, God was Real and Yes, He was there, but for so many years, starting at six, my life was a series of disasters, none of which I had any control over and all of which I still have a hard time understanding.

Recently I asked Him again, Where were you? Two thoughts came immediately:

The first was the eye-opening realization that it was those very situations, those very problems, that drove me closer and closer to Him as a child. I’d never have searched for Him so hard or so diligently as a child had I not needed His help and love. And you will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart, and I will be found by you," declares the Lord. Jeremiah 29: 13-14a)

The second answer that came was the same answer old Job got when he asked God, WHY? Why did You allow all this? God let Job know that He was not accountable to him for His decisions.

In Job 38:4, God speaks. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Once again, the words from Isaiah 55:8 were reinforced. My thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are My ways your ways!

One thing we know for sure is that at the time of Christ’s Ascension to Heaven, He indeed left us a Helper, His Holy Spirit, who lives in us and guides us into all truth. Ask Him; Ask the Helper! If you are a Believer, He is living IN you and He will Help! In John 16:7 Jesus is speaking to His followers who don’t understand that He is about to leave them. Jesus says to them the same words He says to us today:

It is profitable (good, advantageous) for you that I go away. For if I do not go away, The Comforter (the Counselor, The Helper, The Advocate, The Intercessor) will not come to you (to be in close fellowship with you), but if I go away, I will send Him to you, (to be in close fellowship.) (Amplified Version)

On the mantle in the Ten Boom’s home in Haarlem, Holland, home of The Hiding Place, (and now a museum in their honor) still stands a small gilt-framed plaque. Jesus Is Victor

And THIS from a family that to the world, would appear to have lost everything.

The very best is yet to be!

-Corrie Ten Boom

Christ in you, the Hope of Glory.

Colossians 1:27b

2

The Barrette

Call upon Me and I will tell you great and mighty things you do not know.

-Jer. 33:3

She was not a pretty girl but she arrived in the third-grade wearing outrageously pretty clothes. There were perfectly pleated skirts, jumpers, matching sweaters, ironed blouses and sparkling clean black and white saddle shoes. She also possessed a large collection of unusual barrettes, all color-coordinated for each outfit. For the first time ever, I became aware that my clothes were in some subservient category all their own. On the two nails in my tiny bedroom closet, hung a homemade dress or two and a few contributions from the family three doors down. They had three older daughters, and occasionally deposited a bag of very well-worn clothing on our porch. Those long, faded contributions were new to me and I happily assigned each to one of four