Maintaining a Christian Walk — George Verwer

Open Sharing, Revival, and Spiritual Balance

I think one of the beautiful things in the work the Lord has called us into is our emphasis on open sharing, and every leader should have at least some other leader that he can openly share with. Now that doesn't mean there are no pitfalls when you openly share, and we've found that in everything we attempt in our Christian life, the enemy has his booby tracks, he has his minefields.

I shared part of this message when I had the privilege of speaking just about a year ago at the Canadian Revival Convention, in fact it is almost a year ago to the day, the movement in Canada that doesn't invite in too many outside speakers, they experienced revival in the churches in Canada about ten or eleven years ago, and what was once a river has become many streams.

The main revival in a sense has not continued in its intensity, whole churches being turned upside down, people coming into newness of life, but now there are many streams. The two men that the Holy Spirit has especially used in this revival are the Saterra twins, they're twins, very unique men, Italian background, and they go into church, not for a couple of nights, they go in for weeks at a time, it takes them one week just to get the people ready, just to get them all off their TV addiction, because most people go home at night and watch TV, their meetings go on two and three hours, you can imagine attempting that kind of thing in Canadian and American culture.

It was quite an amazing movement, there's a man, Mr. McLeod, some of you may have read some of his writings, he's praying about spending some time on OM, he travels more overseas whereas the Saterra twins feel really burdened for Canada, and so I worked a lot and prayed a lot and brought forth a message which I've called maintaining balance in the midst of a revival.

Revival Must Be Balanced With Spiritual Life

If you study the history of revival, you'll discover that very quickly revivals go into extremism. It's been our burden from the earliest days of OM that we would experience revival, at times becomes a neglected emphasis, and rather than thinking in terms of the quality of spiritual life and living in revival and communion with the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit, we become merely a form of Christian work.

People join the Lord's work, so they join Operation Mobilization. As I shared yesterday, my burden in sharing these things with you is that you can go back and share them with your own team. It's God's purpose for our teams to be functioning in revival, and I want to talk about what that means, and I believe by functioning in revival, we discover the best way to maintain our own spiritual life.

Let's look at a very basic scripture that we've all ministered on, Ephesians chapter five, Ephesians five, verse nineteen, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord.

It's a text I often preach on, and I hope it's a text that you share as well. Compare that with Colossians three, sixteen. If you can keep both places in your Bible, it'll be helpful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another.

It's beautiful, isn't it? Teaching and admonishing one another. It's one of the things that we want to do here, to be able to admonish, to be able to teach one another. Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

And whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him. And then it goes into those very, very basic instructions for the family, about wives submitting themselves to their husbands.

Most of you men don't, probably lack that emphasis, but what about verse nineteen? How are you handling that one? Husbands, love your wives and be not bitter against them. Maintaining spiritual life in Oed means maintaining family life.

You cannot separate one from the other. And there's a passage where all of this, the reality of the fullness of God in a man's life. This is revival. This is revival. Don't think of revival as some special thing that comes every once in a decade, which everybody starts jumping up and down in the church, or feel that the Lord has touched them.

There are more backslidden people that once felt the Lord touched them than you'll ever be able to count. But revival is Christ living in us, controlling us, working through us. There may be the times of special blessing, amen, there may be the times when you feel like jumping up in the air, be careful on the doulos, the very low roof, but revival is a seven-day-a-week reality, not an alternate leap year spiritual jamboree.

And there's no purpose in having a great revival at the next AIC if the river is not going to be carried out into the teen life, seven days a week. I think there's a lot of confusion about revival, I think there's tremendous confusion about the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

And I feel as much as we have to urge people to walk in this reality, we have to be able to point out from the scriptures the dangers. I think most of you know enough of the Word of God to know that most of the epistles were written to correct the church.

You get people dissatisfied with OM and the OM team, and sometimes we don't blame them, and they think that the reason is that this is not the local church. And if they get in the local church, then that's really where the blessing is.

But if you're in fellowship with as many local churches as some of us, you will know that many local churches are experiencing the same problems we experience on our teams, and that often it's no different.

Sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse. Maintaining spiritual life, revival, as it says in Galatians, walking in the Spirit so you don't fulfill the lust of the flesh is difficult in any circumstance.

Now it's interesting that in Ephesians, I'm going to need that glass of water, Rudy, in Ephesians, it says, be filled with the Spirit, and then it follows it, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord.

Very similar to Colossians 3. Some of you have heard me speak about this before, so I won't tarry here, but I hope you're showing your team members this. At this conference, I'm not interested in whether you've heard this before, I'm not interested in even whether you're hearing it now.

I'm interested in knowing whether you're getting some of this basic material, firstly through your own life, down to your team members. It's the greatest challenge we have, to get this down to the newest recruit on the team.

Being Filled With the Holy Spirit

Be not drunk with wine in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord. And then what we emphasized yesterday, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

You know, many of you are preachers, and you go out and you take meetings, and you teach and you preach, and I hope in the midst of your teaching and your preaching, that you are also receiving. I'd love to know from some of you, when you write, who's feeding you, who's challenging you.

Maybe I'm someone who listens to too many tapes, and I've been accused of being a tapeworm, as you have bookworms, but we'd rather not mention that here in Nepal, but I have received so much spiritual help from these tapes, of course they're not a total answer, and just before leaving I've been inviting an Italian wildcat preacher that I've never hardly heard of before, named Tony Compello, from the streets of Pennsylvania.

I just can't tell you what a blessing that man was to me, in my time of making transition from Mexico, packing, changing my suitcase and whatever else, and coming here. We have a tremendous tape library in Bombay, God has spared it in the fire.

I wonder how many of us really make use of that. Different men have such different insight into some of these truths, and I don't see one man necessarily contradicting another, though there are some contradictions, but I see how God works in different people in different ways.

So important, so beautiful, and we have that portrayed here so beautifully because Ephesians talks about being filled with the Holy Spirit, the book of Colossians hardly mentions the Holy Spirit, yet the results in Ephesians and Colossians are the same, and it ends up on that same practical note, Ephesians verse 20, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.

Submission, Leadership, and Mutual Accountability

We have some extremist movements in the West that overemphasize submission, and submission becomes manipulation, and I always have a fear of this sort of heavy-handed leadership that sometimes gets into our teens, where the teen leader is doing just the opposite of what the Bible says.

The Bible says, Lord it not over God's heritage. In other words, you don't rule God's heritage with an iron hand, with a big stick, with some kind of heavy pressure, but you assume that God's heritage is not over God's heritage.

You esteem it, and you work with them in love, and you encourage them with your own life. I was saying to Ray Eichen this morning, it would be tremendous if every leader, including every main coordinator, would spend one week a year out on the teams.

I'm sure some of you are, and I would tell you some of you are visiting teams, it is no good just going in there one day and leaving the next. You'll never accomplish really what God would have you accomplish with a team, through that type of team visiting.

Now, if Ray Eichen, the overall coordinator of the work, visits a team and goes in one day and leaves the next, maybe that could be accepted, but if your responsibility is the cultivation of spiritual life on those teams, you need to go out there at least once in a while and live with them, and go out on the streets with them, and get to talk to those men heart to heart, and you will learn something.

That's very, very important. See, verse 21 talks about submitting to one another. There is a sense where we as leaders are submitting ourselves even to the youngest new recruit. We can learn from him.

We can receive exhortation from him. He should share in all humility what's on his heart, but we can often learn from a man out on the team, and we can learn from one another, and we can learn in our cross-fellowship that we have here during the tea break or during the free time.

For me, the hardest part of these conferences are always the intensive sessions where we discover at times we don't agree on certain things, and we even at times get upset with each other on certain things, and sometimes it gets pretty intense.

That is always the hardest part of a conference like this. That is always wonderful. Whenever you're in a situation where certain things are hard, other things are a blessing, and often the greatest blessing is just to get with individuals and get to know them better and go for a walk and see where the cheapest tea shop is or whatever else in the process.

I think most of you know, and I believe by God's mercy I've proven this these twenty-some years of the work in India, that in no way am I interested in lording over the work here or anywhere else. I've had to constantly change through what I've learned from other people.

I had to acknowledge the gangrene of extremism in my own life. In some of those early tapes, there are things that are extreme and need to be brought into balance by other things. I believe that some of you developed a message and were able to communicate on this thing of spiritual balance and maintaining spiritual life, that you would become such demand in the churches that you'd find it hard to know how to continue in the living.

Because I've found all over the world enormous response to this kind of message. So many of God's people have been crushed by extremism. They have been worked over by unbelievable, uncontrollable local church situations and by manipulative leaders who often are very insecure people.

Leaders are often very insecure people trying to build their own little empire which helps them in turn remain more secure. And when criticism comes and disunity comes and problems come, they crumble.

Keep that in balance. I would love to share with you, I don't think I'll have time, a message that I've been working on, on how to understand Christian leaders. This has been one of the messages I've been working on the most lately.

By the way, I find that every year the Lord gives me at least 10 or 20 major, totally new messages. We cannot just keep preaching the same thing. Now, of course, when we preach, some of the old basics will creep into almost every message.

There's nothing wrong with that. You ever heard Billy Graham? I've heard probably more than most of you, I'm sure. And some of it is incredibly basic. And yet, most of Billy Graham's messages, some new little avenue of light comes in.

I believe that Billy Graham's ministry of exhortation and teaching to the church will in eternity prove to be of greater significance than his evangelistic preaching. Because through that, he's influenced so many Christian leaders who have gone out across the world and have become mighty harvesting instruments for Christ.

The Anointing of God and the Human Factor

This may sound strange to you, but it's been one of my prayers that God would raise up within our more anointed preachers. I'd rather have one anointed preacher in some of your states. In some ways, don't misunderstand that all your team's put together.

There's no substitute for the anointing of God, brothers and sisters. All the energy, all the activity, all the promotion, and all the book sales will never be a substitute for the anointing, the Holy Ghost anointing of God upon a man who's walking with Jesus.

One of the leaders here felt yesterday if he didn't have enough team members, his base would not be justified. He must have been jolted by my rather quick reaction to that, which may or may have not been in the spirit.

When I get to heaven, I will no doubt get a fair number of spankings at the throne of grace. But I said to him, that base is justified if only you are there. Yes. They're the numbers of the people that justify whatever that word means.

LM's basis. One anointed man, one anointed man with a ministry demands secretarial help, demands other practical help. And if we have some anointed men in India, then let's rally around them, loving them, exalting them, working with them.

We do have some anointed men. Some are right here in this room. We know they will be a primary target for the enemy. Often anointed men are subject to experiences and depths of struggle that others don't know so much about.

Many of the anointed preachers I have read about are subject to depression. Spurgeon, perhaps the greatest preacher of all times, was subject to depression. Some say it was because of a gout, a disease that I never understood.

Mary Machine was subject to depression. And this is why it is important for an anointed man to also know how to maintain the spiritual life in the midst of the battle. And I believe some of the keys are found here in Ephesians and Colossians.

Being filled with the Holy Spirit cannot be just a once-and-for-all experience. I have a note in my Bible that says this is in continuous tense in the Greek. I don't know whether that's true or not because I don't know Greek.

But it's wonderful that those of us who don't know Greek can still study at the feet of Greek scholars. We can still read commentaries by men who do know Greek. Probably that's how I got that note in there.

So continuous tense. We go on keeping on being filled with the Holy Spirit. It's a daily experience. I want to ask you, is that your daily experience? I'm not interested in knowing whether you were baptized in the Holy Spirit, terminology some people use, or filled with the Holy Spirit, terminology some other people use five years ago or ten years ago.

I'd like to know whether today you're going on being filled with the Holy Spirit. Is this just spiritual jargon? Is this just terminology we use so that we have a spiritual message that sounds good? Or is it a practical reality?

I think if I had to choose any one group of people to work with in the world today, I would choose Indians. I would choose Indians. I've worked with many people. Mexicans would perhaps run a close second.

Maybe the Spanish and the Italians would run third. Maybe the British would run fourth. In one sense it doesn't matter because life isn't that way. But generally speaking there is a spiritual appetite here in India.

I don't know what it is. People are willing to talk about spiritual things. People respond in the churches. I've never had a church in India where I went and didn't see some response. The problem is one that I'm so bad I've repressed it, forgotten about it.

Of course, Indian brothers always brought me into balance. I went down to Carolina. Boy, the people seem to be coming out of the trees for Jesus. These conventions were just people responding and then someone told me this was a habit.

It can be rather disappointing to the young preacher who finally feels that the anointing of God is settled upon his ministry to be told that these people are doing this out of the habit rather than because the Holy Spirit was convicting them.

The awakening that any evangelist and any preacher has when he begins to discover the deceptive heart of man can be so great he may never recover from it. And they say that one of the hardest ministries to maintain is a ministry of evangelism.

It truly is amazing that Billy Graham has gone on for so many years and many others, as will J. Smith now of over 80 years of age. That same, regardless of things we may not agree with and the extremism that has caused much grief within that work, certainly is still a tremendous testimony of the grace of God, 80 years of age.

Only recently is hell beginning to go down near many, many others. Being filled with the Spirit is a normal Christian life. When we teach on this subject, I think we need to teach the brothers and sisters not only what this is, but what it is not.

Being filled with the Spirit, you may want to note a few of the things that it's not. It does not mean you always feel wonderful. It does not mean that you always feel wonderful. The Spirit-filled man is still very human.

Spiritual Life Does Not Erase Human Weakness

In my mind, I've been working very, very much on a new book. I'll probably write it in my retirement, which means I probably won't write it. But I was going to title the book, The Human Factor. I wanted to borrow some of your testimonies.

The Human Factor. One of the things that has caused much grief in O .M., and O .M. India especially, is the failure to recognize the human factor. That every leader, every anointed man is a human being subject to the human factors, the weaknesses.

Legalism, as I said yesterday, has paid a heavy toll on the church in India. The idea that you're not spiritual if your hair is not cut at a certain length. You can be sure I didn't want to take any chances with any of you, so I got a Nepali haircut before coming down to Bhutan.

It was a beautiful experience because it was so cheap. You know, you can't realize the blessing of working in India where everything is so cheap if this is the only place you've worked. Because I'm sure you see how the prices in India are going up, up, up.

But you know, if you go in Germany and you're in a railway station and you just happen to crave a cup of tea, you'll never get a decent one, I'm going to tell you that, it's going to cost you about nine rupees Indian for a cup of tea.

And when you come out here to India and you discover how inexpensively a lot of things can be done, it really does challenge you to try to emphasize India a little more. Some people feel that for years, George Burwell has had the rest of the movement by its throat in order that India may go forward.

And to this day, finance for India gets absolute number one priority in all of OM worldwide. If ten groups all lay money, India will always generally get it first, if we know that the need is there. Sometimes people like Alfie are a little hesitant to let us know.

Other times there's a lot of confusion as to what the situation is. We count this a great privilege because we highly esteem what you're doing. Do not think because I come out with some negative things that we are not just, in the total picture, just so wonderfully thrilled about what you're doing.

In the midst of the struggles and the failures and the problems, we believe this is an anointed work, we believe the Holy Spirit is bringing to pass an important and historic work. But of course, we long to go on.

And my greatest burden really is your own spiritual walk. I wonder if some of you are being driven a little bit into extremes at times because of the failure to understand the human factor, to understand your own humanity, to understand your own limitations.

Bill Graham said that if he had to do things all over again, he would pace himself more. It's incredibly hard in O .M., in some places, to pace yourself because people look down spiritually on people who are just trying to relax, who are just trying to get a little bit of a break.

It's interesting that one of our many sisters has not had a break or a holiday in, I don't know for how long, a year or two. We somehow seem to have it in our minds that a holiday must mean we've run out of steam or we're going through a hard time.

We don't take a holiday when we're feeling great, we're committed to the work, we're highly motivated, we're filled with the Spirit. We don't take a holiday or a break at that time. What an absolute mistake that is.

Some of you are going to wait until you have a nervous breakdown and you're going to ask for a holiday. For some of you, that will be the end. You'll never recover. You're afraid to talk to your leader.

I hear this often in O .M. I don't feel my leader is approachable. When you say that, you're demonstrating your own immaturity together with perhaps his unapproachability. Two wrongs never make a right.

Some people outwardly never will be very approachable. History shows us that many great, great Christian leaders were not very approachable. At least to certain types of people. But the man who knows the Word of God and loves the Lord Jesus Christ will approach Him anyway.

And if he senses rejection in the first effort, just like a boxing match, he will go back for round two. Building relationships is not easy. And it deeply grieves me that so many people give up trying to build a relationship with this brother or that brother because in round one it didn't work out.

I have people who totally reject me on the simple basis that I forgot their name. I've only had 23 ,000 people in Operation Mobilization. You know, often we get false ideas about Christian leaders. Some people, because in an unusual way I remember their names, they gossip that I have a tremendous memory, which only hinders further progress because then when I don't remember, the person really feels bad.

They feel there's a special case. I don't have that great a memory. I have a mediocre memory. I remember some and I don't remember others. If you want to go into a very nerve-bending place, especially someone in my position, visit the doulos.

One Mexican girl shared with me that she told a friend that she just couldn't consider me as a friend since I had never even shaken her hand. Do you know what it's like to go on a ship and try to shake hands with 300 people?

So am I with the first 50. After that you can't remember which ones you're shaking hands with and which ones you haven't, especially as they appear from all different parts of the ship at different times.

And so you're going back to some saying, Oh, praise the Lord, it's really good to meet you, brother. And he says, You just met me. And as I was going around the ship on sort of a tour, I dodged around the corner and into a tiny room and for some reason I said hello to this Mexican girl and I shook her hand.

Just a few hours before, she was more or less assuming that she would never even meet me, and certainly she would never shake my hand. And therefore I would never be her friend. And you can imagine how it just about blew her away.

She must have thought someone was talking. I didn't know anything about her. I wouldn't be able to tell you who she was today. But somehow the spirit or the coincidence or the providence or whatever you want to call it, led me to just go into that little room and say hello to her, ask her name because I speak Spanish, and shake her hand.

Of course, that was a victory. That just about, if you know the big term in America, blew her away. Not literally, for those of you who are learning English. But in this kind of work, for every one that you win, you seem to lose some.

And so many of us as leaders live under the cloud that we are unapproachable. You have as many women confessing to you over the years that they're afraid of you. I have my secretaries at times finally acknowledge that they were afraid of me.

I accept that. I must at times be very, very frightened. Sometimes my visit to my own office consists of about five minutes. I come in from one series of whatever I've been into wanting to do more in five minutes than any three people would want to do in several hours.

Including winning my proper cup of tea, which really needs the right amount of milk, the right amount of sugar, at the right temperature. You know, not even one out of ten in O .M. can make a decent cup of tea.

Now we know this is of the flesh. But the flesh enjoys it. And so it becomes another hassle, another problem. I've had to really repent. I've had to take extra time with people and just allow them to get to know me better in more calm situations so that in turn I became more approachable.

And I hope you will do that as well. If people are not coming to you in your area, opening their hearts, sharing with you, not everybody, but some, it is a sign that perhaps you are unapproachable. You have an air about you that sets you apart from ordinary folk who would like to talk to you and like to share with you.

Fellowship, Failure, and Discipleship

Fellowship should be as much a vital part of the work in India as evangelism. Evangelism should spring from a team that is in fellowship one with another. Being filled with the Holy Spirit will bring fellowship.

It will bring approachability because with it comes humility. The human factor will still be there. Failure at times will still be there. One of the men who was touched in that Canadian revival has written a book, Failure, the Back Door to Success.

Don't be afraid to acknowledge failure to your team. I can't believe it when I meet with people who have never heard their leader acknowledge real failure. Don't be afraid to acknowledge failure and to share some of the struggles you are having.

If you just try to maintain this air of spirituality that you don't have these struggles, you don't have these problems, you're way up here. Some of the team members for a while they may be captivated by it.

But ultimately it's going to cave in. And we want long-term relationships with people. We want reality at any cost. So the Spirit-filled life does not destroy your humanity, but slowly, continuously brings it into control.

It's a long-term program. Don't be surprised when some of these team members do something completely stupid. See, there's a great danger in our end that for a short time we force people into a spiritual capsule.

I think this is especially true of women because some of the things in OIM are so contrary to the cultural lifestyle of a woman in India. And so for a period of time we force them into a particular lifestyle.

We don't mean to do that. It just so easily happens. And we need to ask ourselves what's happening to these women when they leave the team. That's why I believe that discipling women in Category 2 in the context of their own culture is as important as bringing them onto the team and discipling them in Category 1.

And I think if we cut down on the number of women we'll be able to increase our input into Category 2 discipling and encouraging women where they are in the culture where they are. Not just single women, but married women.

And I just pray that many of our women will develop an anointed women's ministry teaching in small groups. Sharing. In OIM worldwide there is an enormous need for more women who will hire in public ministry.

Enormous need. One sister wrote me a note on the doodads. Just saying how much she was praying open at some of the married women. She was thinking of one in particular, but I'll use it in general terms.

You know, it would develop a public ministry. There are things that women can say that men cannot say. Things that women understand that men will barely understand. There are open doors that women will have that we will never have.

Let us never, men, fall to the pit of thinking the women's work is secondary. The reason we would like less women is not because they are less effective. It's simply because the women's work is more complex and it's the women's leaders trying to cope with all of this that would prefer less women so that a more in-depth training can take place.

Spirit-Filled Family Life and Emotional Honesty

We think of being filled with the Spirit when we're ministering the Word of God. But in contemporary society, we need to emphasize being filled with the Spirit in rearing your children. Some of the mistakes I made as a father in moments when I was not walking in the Spirit, I think really hurt my own children.

Controlled discipline in the home is not easy. Under the pressure of home life, the pressure that home creates, it's so easy to get into the flesh. I find, especially in certain cultures, men very unwilling to really share about the sins they've committed in their own home.

They have Operation Cover-Up. If Watergate is a tragedy, it's just as much a tragedy when we're trying to cover up our sins, afraid to really walk in the light, even end up telling lies. Yes, Christians tell lies because there's a fear of the truth being known and what may come as a result of that.

We can be filled with the Spirit and weep. We can be filled with the Spirit and laugh. We can be filled with the Spirit and be hurt. Being filled with the Spirit does not liquidate normal emotion, struggle, heartache.

Being filled with the Spirit is not an arrival point. It's a continuous journey. It is not an arrival point. I'm here now. The main thing now is to get other people to come up and be with me. We're constantly growing.

No matter how filled we are, we need to be filled more. Somebody came on D .L. Moody who emphasized being filled with the Spirit and said, Look, Moody, why are you always saying that we need to be filled again and again with the Holy Spirit?

And Moody said, Because I leak. I leak like the little barrel you pulled off the truck yesterday. It leaks. All of us have leaks. I have leaks. I have to be filled again and again. I heard testimonies of some that say they have a good quiet time and it carries them through the rest of the day.

I'm not one of those fortunate souls because I have the ability to go directly from my quiet time into the kitchen and say something totally in the flesh to my dear wife. Now, those of you who are on a higher plateau of spiritual reality than me in that area, you know, praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord. Our quiet time is not some kind of a Christian Ouija board. It's not a matter of just feeding certain cliches and Bible verses into your mind in the morning and therefore, like some kind of programmed computer, the rest of the day it all just ticks out in neat, orderly fashion.

There has to be the moment-by-moment crucifixion. Going into that kitchen after your quiet time and whatever happens, whatever your wife says, to somehow be able to take the lower road, to somehow respond in love and to have a sensitivity toward her and where she is.

She missed her quiet time trying to get you your perfectly patterned cup of tea or perfectly brewed cup of tea. We all have a bit of our fathers within us. You ought to understand yourself and I've had real struggle in that, understanding myself.

Understand your own father. Some of you may not even know who your father is, the one that gave you the very genes that are in your body. But I can remember my father grousing at my mother because the egg was not boiled the exact amount of hardness.

We have in the Western world, and I'm sure you do it in India, a soft-boiled egg, medium soft-boiled, a hard-boiled, you know, in many different eggs. And we are a family into soft-boiled eggs. And yet the man who likes a soft-boiled egg hates a runny egg.

I'll never forget Vak Singh, the only man in the world who forced me to eat a raw egg. He's a raw egg neurotic. He pops raw eggs into his mouth, you know, like a squirrel would eat acorns. And he felt this was one of the keys to taking me further in the things of the spirit.

And he insisted on me eating a raw egg. It's a miracle that my entire stomach content did not come up on his plate. I like my eggs cooked at just the certain temperature. And I eat my eggs in a very special way.

I put them in a little cup. The cup has to be the exact right size so that the egg does not drop into the cup so you cannot get it. But it sits in the cup like a Nepali hat on the top of a Nepali hat.

And then I cut the toast into well-arranged strips. And I dip the toast into the yolk of the egg. Now if the egg is hard, the toast does not go down. And everything must be just according to timing. It's usually three and one-fourth minute on the egg timer.

You have to have an egg timer. But if the egg has come from the refrigerator, a fourth of a minute extra will have to be added. Otherwise, the yolk will not be in the right place. And so I dip the toast.