The Night the Lord Filled My Room

The Night the Lord Filled My Room

by Jo Kimmel Chestnut

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I know that as we gather together, the greatness of the Lord is going to be present in our midst. And it’s because we’re bringing anticipatory hearts. Hearts that are open and eager to learn what God wants us to learn as we’re together.

I first heard about the Camps Farthest Out in 1952. I had gone to a meeting of the conference ministers of the Methodist Church in western Oklahoma to hear a man speak. And apparently I was enthralled by what the man said because when I kind of came to myself, everybody had gone out of this huge auditorium. And I was sitting up in the balcony. And I looked around and nobody was in any of the seats. But down on the first floor by a door was a tall, handsome young man. And I thought, well, since I’m going out of the building anyway, I might as well go out through that door. So I went out down the stairs and out toward the door. And this tall, handsome young man smiled at me. And he said, “You look to me as though you love Jesus as much as I do. Why don’t we go and have a Coke and talk about Him?” So I liked that idea. And we went over to the place that was most famous in those days to get Cokes. And sat and talked about the Lord. And then he asked me if I would be interested in going to a camp farthest out. And I thought he said a camp for the stout.

And in those days, I was very slender. And I couldn’t imagine why I would need to go to a camp for the stout. So when I asked him what he said, he enunciated a little better. And I understood that it was a camp farthest out. And he said he was going to be going and that he would be coming through Oklahoma City, where I was living, and could take me if I could go. And I thought, well, I would love to go because he seems like an interesting person, but I didn’t have any money. And when I mentioned that I didn’t have any money, he said, “Well, they do have scholarships available.” And he said, “The woman in charge of them lives here in Oklahoma City. Why don’t we see if we could talk with her and maybe you could get a scholarship?” And we called Ruth Toon. Maybe some of you know Ruth. We went to her home, talked with her, and she gave me a scholarship. And I went to that camp farthest out with this young man and had an absolutely fantastic time. I had gone to church since I was a little girl. My parents didn’t go, but I went because I was just drawn. And I loved the singing. I’ve always sung very loudly.

And I embarrass people, I know. But it was a happy time for me when I was in church. And at this particular camp, I just had never met such happy people. You know, often in some churches you have a number of people in it that look like they have just eaten green persimmons. Sort of puckered mouths and frowning. But at this particular place, people seemed so filled with joy and happiness. And there was this one little man that spoke that was just fabulous. I just delighted in hearing him. I’d never heard anybody talk like that before. As he would talk, in between phrases or even words sometimes, he’d say, “Hallelujah, praise the Lord, glory, thank You, Jesus.” And I never heard that. And he kind of bounced up and down when he said these things. And in between these exclamations of joy and thanksgiving, these pearls of wisdom just seemed to flow out of him. And, oh, I loved it. And that was Rufus Moseley.

Well, I had such a tremendous experience at that camp. And they told us, they said, “When you go back home, don’t try to tell other people what you experienced because they can’t understand it. But you just, if you want a prayer partner, you start thanking God that you’re going to have a prayer partner.” When I got back to the campus, I began to thank God that I was going to have a prayer partner. And it wasn’t too long until one of the young men at the university came to me one day and said, “Would you read the Bible with me every morning from 6 to 7 in the top floor of the music building?” And I thought, here’s my prayer partner. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s my prayer partner. And so Lawrence and I began to meet together and read the Bible together, talk about it, pray together. And as the days and the weeks went by, other young people would come and they’d say to him or to me, “What are you two doing up in the music building early of a morning?” And we said, “Well, come and see.” And by the end of the semester, there were over a dozen of us who were meeting primarily to pray. It was great.

It was the beginning, I think, of a real growth in my own life. Oh, I’d been interested in the things of the Spirit since I was 11 years old. When I had a tremendous cleansing experience with the Lord as I knelt at the altar rail in a little Methodist church during a revival. And I felt so clean inside when I got up. And I went home and I tried to talk to my mother about this. Well, now I know she was embarrassed. She didn’t know how to handle it. But she just sort of turned me off. And I just kept it in my heart then from that time on. And then when I was 14, I had joined the church. I was a member of the church. And we went in a little church where everybody comes together at Sunday school. And you have opening exercises. And then you, after your opening exercise, you each go to your classes. And then you come back for closing exercises. And at the end of the closing exercise that Sunday morning, old Mrs. Hoover. And to me at that time, she was old Mrs. Hoover. I’m her age now, but, you know.

I was just a kid. And she seemed very old to me. She was my Girl Scout leader. And Mrs. Hoover was invited to give the closing prayer. And I think maybe this is the first prayer I ever heard. One of the things she said was, “We thank Thee that we feel Thy presence.” And I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything. And I thought I was the only one in the whole church that didn’t feel God’s presence. Of course, I know now that probably old Mrs. Hoover and only a few others felt His presence. But at that time, I thought I was the only one. And I stayed for the worship service, but I was thinking about feeling God’s presence. Now, I didn’t know you could pray most any time. I thought you either prayed at church or you prayed at night when you went to bed. Those were the only two times that I knew that you could really pray. So I waited all day for night to come so that I could pray and ask God to let me feel His presence. And I remember very well what I was wearing. I had some little lavender pajamas my mother had made me and embroidered my name on the pocket. And in my room was a window that was, oh, maybe two feet from the floor and then went up almost to the ceiling.

And I sat on that floor and looked out the window and it was a beautiful time of the year. The lilac bush was blooming out there. I could see the moonflowers that opened. And this great yearning came on me to feel God’s presence, whatever that meant. And as this yearning just got stronger and stronger in me, I began to pray out loud, “Oh, please.” And before I could say much more, the Lord just filled my room with His presence and His power. Just scared me to death. I jumped into bed and I pulled the sheet up over me and I just lay there wondering what was going to happen.

And after a while, that feeling dissipated and I fell asleep. But you know, I didn’t pray again for months. I was afraid I might feel His presence again. But as I got to thinking about it, it had been a wonderful experience before I had gotten afraid. I felt very loved and very warm. And I began to want to feel that way again. But you know, not too much. And so I began to pray rather tentatively to the Lord. And oh, the Lord is gentle with us much of the time. And He began to let me have an experience of His presence that I could handle. And it was beautiful. I began to want to read the Bible. This happened years and years later with my oldest daughter, Fran. When she got zapped by the Spirit, she wanted to read the Bible. And she, when we lived in Arizona, my room was above hers. We had a tri-level house and mine was above hers. And then, here was kind of the living room and then up here was mine. And I heard her laughing one night down in her bedroom. Just laughing. She has a really infectious laugh. And so, I could hear her come up the stairs. You know, it kept getting closer and closer as she was just laughing and laughing.

And finally, by the time she got to my doorway, I was laughing because it was so infectious. And finally, when I asked her, you know, “What is it?” She said that she’d been reading the story of Lazarus and she told me this interspersed with laughter so it didn’t all come out at once. But she said, “You know, suddenly it dawned on me as I was reading that what a lucky stiff Lazarus was.”

I thought that was wonderful. You know, there are different levels of understanding to the Bible. She’d hooked in at that level. But somehow, I wanted to read the Bible. And I got a little group of people, my own age, to start reading the Bible with me one afternoon a week after school. And of all places to start, we started in Genesis. Genesis.

I wouldn’t advise that, really. I thought you had to start at the beginning of the book and read it all the way through. See how dumb and naive I was in so many ways. I still am. But it killed us. It just killed a group off. You know, and I didn’t ask the minister, I didn’t tell him what we were doing, I didn’t ask him for any commentary. I didn’t know there were commentaries on the Bible. I just thought you read the Bible. And it wasn’t long until we just sort of lost interest in it. Today, I’d say, start with the Gospel of Mark. Read it through in a sitting. You know? Because you can read it in an hour. And it’s so immediate. Time after time in the Gospel of Mark you see the word “immediate.” Immediately He did this. Immediately He did that. So life went on and I was a freshman. Fell deeply in love with a senior boy who was a snare drummer in the band. I was a drum major, you know, wore the big hat and the whistle and had the big baton and led it. And I’ll just have to tell you this. One time when we were in contest for our marching band we still received superior, which is the highest we could get.

But I was out of step the whole time. I feel sort of the way Magnum P.I. feels if you ever see that program. He kind of bumbles along in his profession and somehow everything begins to work out for good in spite of him. And that’s sort of the way I sort of bumble into things and then the Lord brings richness and grace and glory out of them. But Joe was going to be a minister and I thought, oh, there’d be nothing more wonderful than to be married to a minister. Because I thought if I were, you know, all I’d think about would be the Lord. See how innocent and naive I was? And especially those of you who are married to ministers or who are ministers. And we dated of course and when I was a senior I accepted a ring from him. And he was already in Tennessee from Oklahoma going to school. And he invited me to come out for a whole week. His fraternity was having all sorts of festivities for a week. And I asked my mother if I could go and she said, “Well, I’ll have to talk with your father.” In our house I slept upstairs and on the stairway there was one special step. If I were on it I could listen and hear my parents in the bedroom. And this night I crept down to listen to what my dad was going to say, yes or no, could I go. And I heard my mother say, “I think we can trust Joanne. I don’t think she’ll do anything to disgrace us.” And I heard my dad say, “Well, it would be alright for me to go,” and I was so happy I don’t think I slept the rest of the night, but I played like the next morning that it was news to me when mother told me I could go. Well, while I was out there Joe and I were together morning, noon and night. And as I was with him I really got acquainted with him. Before that I’d kind of been in love with love. You know how you look deeply into somebody’s eyes and you feel like melting butter.

And you know how your heart goes pretty fast and you kind of flush. I was in love with love, I think, and the feelings that I had, and as I got to know Joe better I thought, I can’t spend the rest of my life with this fellow. So I thought, well, I know it’d break his heart if I break the engagement, so maybe the train will wreck on the way home and I’ll die and I won’t have to tell him. But it didn’t.

I got home and he came out for my graduation and I happened to be valedictorian in my class and had to give a speech. Well, I got up to give my speech and I didn’t have a Kleenex with me and my nose started dripping. See? And so every once in a while I go, and people thought I was crying that I was leaving high school, I was so glad to get out. And so when it was over I had planned to tell Joe that night and give him his ring back, you know, I couldn’t marry him, but he was so proud of me I couldn’t tell him. So the next day, the next day he was to come over, we went out in the backyard and sat on some lawn chairs and I finally told him that I just wasn’t ready to get married, that there was a lot of other things I wanted to do before I settled down, and I pulled the ring off and I gave it to him and I started crying because I knew I’d just broken his heart and I ran in the house crying and my oldest sister Maureen saw me, she grabbed me by the shoulder, she said, “What’s he done to you? If he’s done anything you ought to kill him.” And I said, “No, I’ve broken his heart. I’ve given him his ring back, you know.” And I went in and lay on the bed and was very dramatic about the whole thing. Three months later, he married somebody else.

Well, as I went to Camps Farthest Out and as I learned that God has a plan for my life and that I can get in touch with that plan for my life, it made a difference in the way I lived it.

And Glenn Clark said, “We’re all angels. We’ve had bumps on our heads and we have amnesia and we don’t know it, you know, that we’re angels.” I met Glenn at probably the second camp I went to. Little short rotund man. By the time I knew him, he had his bald head and little fringy white hair here. Kind of stuttered when he spoke. His thoughts went so far ahead of his tongue.

And he took a shine to me somehow. I was always first in line for breakfast. I think I had a hollow leg in those days. And I was always first in line for all the meals. I still am, come to think of it. But anyway, Glenn brought his tray over and he asked if he could sit beside me and I was tongue-tied.

I just didn’t know what to say except I kind of nodded my head, I guess. And as he spoke with me, he suggested I might come to his room that afternoon and have a time of prayer with him. Well, I could hardly wait for it to get to be afternoon after the horizontal hour. I didn’t really rest much during that time. I was so excited. And as soon as I knew it was time to get up, I was off my bed and over to his cabin, rapping on the door. And he invited me in and he sat in a little straight-back chair. And he asked me to kneel in front of him. And he pulled a yellow grosgrain ribbon about that long, about that wide, out of his pocket. And he put my wrists together and he bound them. And he said, “I’m going to make you a slave girl to Christ.” And he prayed that Jesus would take me as a slave girl and send me anywhere to do anything He wanted me to do on this planet. If you think that didn’t make an impression on me, even today, if I sit and I notice my wrists just happen to be crossed, the first thing that comes to my mind is, I’m a slave girl to Christ.

I bless Glenn. If you don’t know that man’s writings, get acquainted with him. He was so far ahead of his time. I know we’re going to have a great time here. We can’t even begin at this point to imagine what it’s going to be like. Because it’s so much better than anything we could think or dream of. And I’m anticipating what God’s going to do in our individual lives. And I think He’s going to be revealing things to you that are just going to, you know, make you fly in your spirit. Thank you for letting me share tonight. And I’m really happy to be here and especially to be speaking with Earl. Earl. Those Tyson fellows are really neat. I know Tommy and I know Dewey a little bit. And I know Bobby a little bit and Earl a little bit. And I’ve really been anticipating this. Because I think he’s got a lot that’s going to come through him for me. And I’m open and eager to be a part of that. Thank you. Thank you.