The Helper

On one of the rare mornings, on our holiday, earmarked for doing our own stuff, Joe went off the get a hair cut while I took mum around Sainsbury’s supermarket.

We don’t have a Sainsbury’s in Inverness. There are a number of Tesco shops, a Morrisons, and a Co-op.

Being as mum is a little shaky on her feet, we commandeered a wheelchair and she balanced a basket on her knee. There wasn’t much on the list, just enough to see her through to the weekend – bread and milk and other necessities. My niece, Kelly does the proper weekly shop with her at the weekend.

The wheelchair wasn’t heavy to push, but there were lost of trolleys and lots of shelf stackers to get in the way. In Tesco I might have been able to navigate blindfolded to the UHT milk, but not in Sainsbury’s. Rather than toil up and down the aisles looking for what we needed, I kept tapping the shelf stackers on the shoulder and asking them for directions. They were incredibly well informed. Such and such an item was on aisle 37, or aisle 24 or whatever. My mum was very impressed with how swiftly we got around and finished the shopping.

The shelf stackers knew exactly where everything was and in some cases, rather than just tell me, they walked beside me till we got to the right place. Without their help we could have been wandering around aimlessly for ages, perhaps giving up altogether!

I have just been reading about the Holy Spirit.

How often are we like the shoppers in a supermarket, endlessly trailing up and down the aisles trying to track down some obscure ingredient for a dish? Asking the person who knows where we will find what we are looking for makes things so much easier. Likewise, we stumble through life, looking for answers, scraping our spiritual knees in the process when we could ask the One who knows!

Jesus does not call the Holy Spirit the Helper without a good reason. How sad that He gives us a Helper, and we don’t ask for help! Our walk with Jesus could be a really vibrant experience if we used the help the Holy Spirit offers.

It is not enough really to merely comment that we need to use the help the Holy Spirit offers. What am I going to ask Him to help me with?