On Sabbatical

I'm indulging in a reading marathon of sorts, so my brain's been focused on drinking in the thoughts of others rather than leaking anything out. I didn't anticipate my blog going dormant so suddenly and protractedly, but I suppose this is a season for me to listen, pray, and read.

Peace.


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James 5:16 (Prayer Book)

Prayer is good. Part of James 5:16 (KJV) reads:

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.


I can't remember what today made me suddenly recall the dream I had last night, but it hadn't come back to me in wakefulness until then. In the dream, I was being given the gift of a prayer book and it was contained in a box which, when I opened it, contained a very small volume with a dark cover and some kind of irregularity on the front cover toward the right-hand side, as if it were perhaps one of those small notebooks with an elastic band that slides around to keep it closed, but I couldn't quite distinguish it.

It was a bit worn, as it had been owned before, and it was at least a couple of decades old. I recall in the dream thinking that, when I picked it up, I could halfway expect to see yellowed pages from how it looked on the outside. Receiving this prayer book in my dream filled me with the incredible joy of finding treasure and also an overwhelming gladness that this book was now being entrusted to me.

Shortly after I recalled the dream, my spouse and I were sitting in the car eating some drive-thru cuisine to the sounds of the local Roman Catholic radio station. I'd say we had the radio on for maybe half an hour tops, and I know it's pretty likely that one would hear the words "prayer book" mentioned on such a radio station, but when I heard it, the dream was reinforced and I began to be sure that I was to seek out that book quasi-immediately.

I told my spouse about the dream and said that, if we passed a Christian bookstore on the way back, I might need to stop there and pick up a book. However, just as we started out of the parking lot, there was a Half Price Books store less than a block away, and looking at the store's sign felt right to me, so we stopped there and I went in. As my spouse was going to stay in the car, I said to call my cell if I was taking too long.

Got to the religion section, found prayer books, and there were two shelves to examine, with all kinds of hymnals intermixed. As I was looking, it occurred to me that browsing used books was definitely the right way to go because the book in my dream wasn't new. However, I opened my mind to the possibility that the book He wanted me to get might not look just like the one in the dream and, scanning the shelves, waited for one of them to call out to me.

I felt the Holy Spirit upon me and peace came over me. I paused to say a prayer of love and thanks that He was right there with me, and how I honor and cherish His presence.

It was a small, dark-colored volume, leatherbound, and it had seen some hard times. The first few pages had been torn out and a previous owner had written in the first half of the Table of Contents on the flyleaf attached to the cover, and all the publication information was missing. The upper-right-hand corner of the cover looked like it had been a little mauled by a dog, and there were lots of scratches across the page edges, which were a silver color.

My cell phone rang which, at the time, I didn't see as an indicator that my search was over, but in retrospect that's pretty clear. I kept looking for a short while, passing slowly over the books so as not to leave out even the smallest volume. Then I finished, paid $7.55, and brought it back to the car.

As I held it, it occurred to me that not only did this book resemble the one in my dream in that it wasn't new, but also the mangled cover corner made the edge look irregular, just like it was in the dream. We had some more errands to run, for the next of which my spouse had to get out of the car, leaving me alone with the book for a bit. I asked where it wanted to open and I prayed the prayer to which it opened. As soon as I started, a physical manifestation came upon me that I can neither describe nor explain in the context of a blog, but be it said that something was happening.

Then I started having a conversation with Him in a low voice, right there in the car. I asked,

Should I go back to Bethel again?

to which He replied with the question,

Do you want more of me?

Oh boy. I said Yes in every way I knew how. Of course this brings up a ton of conflicts and it won't be easy, but I sorta have to. I need more of Him!


Now that I think of it, I really had sowed the seeds of this encounter earlier today: First thing today, I had to go accompany my spouse someplace and then wait for about an hour, so I brought a book to read (one of my extra-Biblicals). When the time came, though, I never got to the book because I had started praying and just kept going, feeling ever nearer to Him. It was after this that I remembered the dream and the rest of these events came forth.

Glory to You, Lord Christ!


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Resurrection Day 2009

Got to church today hoping to receive, but I was called to give instead. We sat in the back row (at spouse's insistance, long story) and during the worship time, love just went out from me to these people and I started praying love, peace, and healing over that house. I drew from what I suppose has become a resource now, the connection that comes when I turn to Him in faith, and the house there just needed an outpouring of the Spirit, so I stood there in the back row praying over them, loosing Heavenly things over their house inasmuch as I'm able.

The specific altar call at the end of the service was for people who were especially broken or suffering, so I waited for that crowd to thin down before I went up and just quietly knelt down to try to listen to what He might be trying to speak to me. I closed my eyes and just saw pages of the Bible flipping in front of my eyes; I tried to single out a chapter and verse, asking whether there was a specific one He was trying to show me, but the pages kept passing quickly. Isaiah and Hebrews were the two chapter headings I could make out but the numbers kept changing, so although I honed into two ZIP codes, I didn't find a direct address.

Add to this the peculiar fact that He has just (in the past week) opened up the letters of Paul to me, and things get complicated. Every time I'd get through the New Testament to the end of Acts, I'd get a message to go back to the Gospels and go through again, that I wasn't yet ready to start on Paul (I went through those chapters maybe five times). Now that I'm opening up Paul's letters, today I just got two more chapters to add to the stack. The stack's becoming intimidating, especially with all the extra-Biblical stuff I'd had lined up as well.

Gotta start somewhere.
Oh yeah, and He is risen indeed: Alleluia!


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Return of the Electric Bible

My "electric Bible" is a compact ESV Bible that I bought in 2006 when I had the experience of receiving God into my life for good. I brought it with me everywhere I went for more than a year, and bit by bit I waterproofed the thick, leather cover by working melted bits of wax into it. It's worn at the corners and exceedingly soft to the touch, and some of the gold has rubbed off the edges of the pages where I read most. It fits right into my hands and is a little smaller than the span of my hands so that when it rests there, my fingers touch and start to fold together.

This book in particular has always done something special for me, and a few times it has sent surges of energy up my arms as I held it (thus my affectionately naming it "electric"). Generally speaking, though, it does give me these gentle, quiet pulses of energy when I hold it, like little waves lapping against a boat sitting still on a lake. It's such a delight to hold that once I touch it, it's hard to put it down again and leave it alone. It calls to me, almost as though it yearns for me to come and touch and hold and read. It settles me and declares peace over my body no matter what the conditions. It wakes, warms, and energizes me as it calls me to an ever-deepening relationship with its contents.

When we went on our trip to Bethel, this particular Bible went directly into the small carry-on bag that I held onto at all times and never let out of my reach (along with plane tickets and other vital necessities). When we got to the hotel room, however, I searched the bag and the electric Bible was nowhere to be found. I'd remembered seeing it in the bag at the airport and, though I hadn't recalled having taken it out, it had somehow disappeared. Both my spouse and I searched all our bags and the entire hotel room until I became quite upset, having thought I'd lost it.

The "most probable conclusion" at which I arrived was that, the night before, I had needed to use it after I was finished packing, so surely I left it out, had imagined seeing it at the airport, and would find it upon our return. The "most probable conclusion" at which my spouse arrived was that someone had stolen it during the trip and that we'd never see it again.

I soon took courage in the thought that perhaps it would bring joy to whomever it ended up with, and also that perhaps it was time for me to go buy another one, so I did. The one I bought was a different translation (NASB), different size, and different feel, but still I like it quite a lot. It took the place of the old one in my always-at-hand carry-on bag, and it went with me everywhere during the trip: I read and prayed with it at the prayer house and brought it to services with me.

The night we got home from the trip, however, was a very weird night for a few different reasons. I had gotten into a worked-up, shaky state in which I could feel my pulse pounding at what was probably about 110 bpm, my left arm ached, I was having trouble breathing, and there were small chest pains. Wanting not to wake and alarm my spouse, I just kept an eye out for any "crushing" sensation in the chest that would signal a definite heart attack, but none came.

Still shaky, achy, and wired, though, I started to get very upset again about the loss of the electric Bible; I started to be truly grieved about it and became a little obsessive about the matter. I scoured the place three or four times looking for where I might have left it and neglected to pack it. Giving up looking, I prayed fervently and almost frantically asking the Lord that it be restored to me. I knew that He knew how much it had meant to me.

I knew He had heard me, so I ended with a prayer of thanks and headed upstairs to the bedroom. A feeling of peace descended over me, even though my body was still shaking and hurting in ways that made me a little nervous. I still wondered whether I was going to have a cardiac event that night, but now there was a new peace in having lifted up my prayer, so I lay down in bed to try to sleep. I thought, "well, if it's my time now, life sure just got a whole lot easier, as I'm being called home before more of the really hard times could come." I decided that if it was His will that I go, I'd like to be holding the two things I treasure most in the world, so I put one arm around my spouse and held that new Bible in my other hand. I fell asleep asking that no matter what else, His will might be done.

Somewhat surprised to wake the following morning, I noticed that all the nervousness and the physical symptoms that had me worried were gone, though I felt a little drained. I went downstairs to get a morning-type beverage and, on the way back up, my mind caught sight of that small carry-on travel bag. I heard a small voice suggest, "unpack that one now," so I did, thinking it was a voice of reason primarily for the sake of entropy control, as the bedroom had gone beyond messy to "disaster area." Putting things away, I had unpacked the bag about halfway when my hand found a familiar shape and pulled it forth in disbelief: there it was. The electric Bible had been restored to me.

When my spouse woke up, I hid it behind my back and started, "just in case there was any doubt in your mind as to whether His hand is at work in our lives..." and pulled out the Bible. I received back one very surprised expression.

"Where'd you find it?"

"In the same bag, under the little shelf thingy that lines the bottom. I thought I'd looked there before, but I didn't find it."

"I felt around in that space too, when we were searching the hotel room, and it wasn't there."


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Glimpse

It was just for a short while, but we did make it to Bethel's awesome Friday night worship service. It was the first time I'd been in the Sanctuary area as a part of their body of believers. We got there early and sat a while watching people gather and listening to the worship team band get ready for the service.

Does anyone remember the analog radio dial? Perhaps they still exist out there somewhere, where you actually turn a dial or do something continuous (not like clicking along in uniform increments of frequency as is usual now) to scroll up and down the radio band. If you do this very slowly, stations will fade in and out; some will get very clear before they fade and others will barely come in before they're gone. You'll pick up a piece of a sentence here or a fragment of a song there, with stretches of static in between.

That's what it felt like in my head as I looked from one person to the next and my ears heard pieces of conversations fade in and out. With a couple of people, I looked at them and felt as though I'd known them for years, like passing a radio station in the band where you recognize a song from just the brief moment that comes in clearly. People were registering with me, fading in and out amid the static, and I got a syllable -- three phonemes -- when my eyes passed over one particular person; it said, "Sol," (pronounce it somewhere between Saul and soul) and I don't know whether that was a fragment of a bigger word, was its own word in a sentence, or a portion of the person's name. It was just spoken in my head very clearly and had nothing to do with anything I was hearing at the time.

Though that was the only syllable that came through, I felt the fullness of nascent pronouncements when I looked all over the roomful of people, as if there were a statement or message in there concerning each one of them but something was impeding my ability to "tune in" to everything save that one breakthrough, runaway syllable.

Now, I could tell you only vaguely what the person looked like; the memory has faded out. It's not as though it got burned into my mind or carried any sense of great urgency. It seems significant, though, that the potential for much, much more seemed already to be there.

The same feeling did not occur at any of the three services on Sunday, nothing of the same sort at all. The next time I go there, though, I'm going to go sit in the same place where it happened on the same evening of the week and try again, hoping to trigger a more lengthy "download," as it were.

That was my first download ever, though; an infinitesimal glimpse of potential things far greater. I can only marvel at whether He might have done this to whet my appetite for something to come more fully at a later time. It's certainly something I'll not soon forget.


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Into Love

I'm about to testify to the greatest miracle I've ever personally witnessed and to which I can hold up no doubt in the world because it happened right here within me. First, let me tell you what it is; then I'll tell you what it means. During a period of prayer and fasting, I was asking for two things: to be closer to Him, and that He would make me whole. In response,

He made me into love.

That's the only way I know how to put it. I became love at His touch. I walked in love, I looked around and saw through the eyes of love, it went on for days, and sometimes I can even still get there now. I saw people as love sees people, and I felt toward other human beings as I'd never been able to before.

Perhaps with a little background I can attempt to do some justice to the sheer magnitude of this miracle.


I've always hated children. People would say to me, "well you were a child once, too," to which I would reply, "yes, and that's why I hate them!" To me, no child was ever cute; when people would show me baby pictures I'd smile and feign affection but would feel utter disgust. When I saw a child I'd be overtaken by an instant, gripping, all-consuming urge to get away from it somehow, even if it wasn't screaming or misbehaving. If the child were of a different race or of the opposite gender, that could help my disposition a little, but seeing any child would set me into a blazing fury (often of expletives). A family with four or more children would make me physically nauseated. I won't even talk about how I felt about women getting pregnant, especially "by accident." I had a zero-tolerance policy for procreation in general.

You can see where this was coming from, yes? A therapist once told me, "There are some people in the world who simply should not have children. Unfortunately, your mother was one of those people."


After the Lord made me into love, all that attitude, all that hatred and anger, all that hurt just wasn't anywhere to be found. It's as though I looked inside myself and only saw a vacant storefront with a "For Lease" sign in the place all that pain and rage used to live. No forwarding address: just gone.

My spouse was the one first to pick up on the miracle. I'd been standing in line at a sandwich shop for about a half an hour waiting to get said spouse some food (this was during the time I was fasting) and there was this huge group of people with like eighteen zillion sandwich orders just ahead of me. I was standing there loving everyone, in awe of this new gift from Him, and everyone I saw made me smile and glow warmly.

I put in my order, got the food, and when I got back to the car my spouse said, "I'm so sorry you had to wait that obscenely-long amount of time in line, and with all those children around, you must've been going crazy!" I hadn't thought about it while I was in there, but there had been maybe 5 or 7 children in the huge party in front of me and I hadn't noticed a thing. I simply loved everyone I saw, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and somehow that included children.


Everything's different now. People being angry at each other puzzles me now. I can still get annoyed or frustrated, but I no longer spontaneously experience the pure, seething hatred I'd sometimes feel toward others (in traffic, for example). I mean, if I dig for the hatred and trigger it I can get to it, but I'm no longer seeing it through my own eyes; that whole deal now belongs to someone who doesn't exist anymore, so the emotion feels a little like stale bread tastes (if that makes any sense). Even my expletives are getting replaced by harmless, hate-free words.

And the only way I know how to even attempt to explain this incredible, instantaneous shift in my perspective, my outlook, my world-view, and even my knee-jerk reactions to certain stimuli, is to give glory to His hand at work.

I don't believe I would've been in a right place to receive this miracle if I hadn't worked through an issue of forgiveness that I had (problem stated in To Forgive, 3/6/09, and resolution described in Treasure Revealed, 3/17/09); of course, God's miracle would have stood no matter what state I was in, but I feel that my having found forgiveness through Him is what enables His gift of love to continue on in me to this day.

Walking in love -- as love -- is an experience that provokes a turn of phrase I've used before when He's intervened and changed my life: it's as though I'm now on a slightly different planet from the one I was on before. To Him be the glory, thanks, and praise!

Ephesians 5:1-2 (ESV)

1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children;

2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up
for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.


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Devilweeding

This one requires a little bit of background before I launch into description and also requires a bit of faith to believe/understand. I'm going out on a limb because some of the things I'm writing here are of the sort to which I wouldn't have given the slightest bit of credence, say, a few years ago. Now, turns of phrase like "demonic powers" and "gave me a vision of" are WNL (within normal limits), whereas they used to be off the charts, as it were: outside the whole realm of discourse. So proceed either with faith or with caution, to whichever you have the most ready access.

About a month and a half ago, when first I started this blog, I had just been delivered from captivity in the hands of the enemy (demonic powers), which had lasted for at least 6 months. As my good friend was praying for my deliverance, it felt as though the main resident enemies kinda slithered out the top of my head, and on the way out, they gave me a vision of what would happen to me when they got back.

Imagine a body held in place in a high-velocity wind tunnel where the temperature of the air is high enough to vaporize anything in its path. For a large, solid object, it might look rather like an ice cube as it melts; you can't see it melting away at the edges but you can see it shrink, seeming to go faster as the ratio of surface area to volume increases: you can't see the object burning away at the surface because the smoke and vapors it turns into are so quickly blown away in the wind tunnel, too fast to see.

That's what they showed me. An incredible forced-air furnace that dissolved my body.

The Lord is good at turning the enemy's weapons against him, and so He did again with this. I was at Bethel in the prayer house and God had just worked a miracle in me (which will be next post's content), but still I was being attacked intermittently by thoughts I know didn't come from me and I know didn't come from God. I asked Him what I should do with such things. He showed me the following.

I was looking at an overgrown lawn that looked much like the back lawn at our house. Mostly tallish grass covered the ground, but there were three or four large, prominent, thick and tall weeds among the grass. I saw the weeds start to lift out of the ground as if an invisible hand were plucking them out right at the bottom of the stalks where the roots begin, until I saw all the weeds, roots and all, just hanging there in the air.

And He said to me, "now, blow on them." When I did, my breath was somehow amplified and heated so that it produced a wind tunnel of super-heated air just like the one I'd seen before, and the weeds bent in the rushing air and were consumed from the outside in, until there was nothing left but the lawn of grass below. Not even one particle of ash remained.

The Lord gave me an incredible gift in showing me this. Not only does it work on unwanted thoughts, but it's also shown success in application to demons. But not just a puff of air like blowing out a candle; these require a protracted breath to disintegrate fully. Sometimes I'll just have fun by throwing in a huge blast of light along with the furnace just to remind them what they're really up against and not to come back anytime soon.

I do this until my mindscape is clear of them. I always feel closer to Him afterwards, the more free to follow Him more nearly, and waves of joy -- be they little ripples as in a pond or larger waves as in a pool -- often wash over me.


But I'm still waiting for His great tsunami. I'm running along the shore like a frantic ant, seeing it whack other people and chasing after it, aiming directly for its path inasmuch as I can even discern it. I am so ready to "drown the old man," there just aren't human words for it.

I think it was Pastor Kris Vallotton who once said that water baptism isn't just symbolic, but rather it's a prophetic declaration over a person's life. I was "Christened" as an infant with a sprinkling which I think was probably a nice little ritual with no power to it whatsoever. I'm ready for the real thing and so hungry for it my soul screams; nothing could make me stop sprinting along that shore.


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