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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Alabaster House; Fire on Hands

Alabaster House, Bethel Church's Prayer House, Always Open

Bethel Church in Redding, CA calls their prayer house Alabaster House, referring to the alabaster vial of perfume poured out over Jesus' head in (I'm fairly sure the following is the particular Scripture to which they refer; someone please let me know if I'm misremembering; that little monument is one of the things I forgot to photograph) Mark 14:3-6 (here in NAS):

3 While He was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper,
and reclining at the table, there came a woman with an
alabaster vial of very costly perfume of pure nard; and she
broke the vial and poured it over His head.

4 But some were indignantly remarking to one another,
"Why has this perfume been wasted?

5 For this perfume might have been sold for over three
hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor." And
they were scolding her.

6 But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you bother her?
She has done a good deed to Me."

In the same way, when we bring our gifts of worship, prayer, and service to Him, we encourage each other to pour out our most precious gifts unto Him, and if someone wants to call that "waste," then great, let's "waste" the heck out of the best of all we have in offering it to Him!

Knowing that Bethel had a prayer house that was always open was a key factor in my deciding to actually head all the way out to California and go there. Pastor Bill Johnson, I think, once jokingly referred to Bethel as becoming like a "Denny's®: Always Open" when they first started leaving the prayer house open 24 hours. (However, as Alabaster House is overseen by Pastor Beni Johnson, I rather like thinking of it as "Beni's: Always Open" instead.) There is 24-hour video surveillance over every square centimeter as well, so don't even think about heading over there with any ill intent.

Sure enough, the morning after we flew in and got to Redding, I dragged my poor, unsuspecting spouse out of bed at 5:00 and through the chilly, pre-dawn darkness so I could come and pray. What was most surprising is that there were already several people there! There is praise and worship music playing inside at all times, though the volume varied so there must be a control for it somewhere. I kinda wish there were designated "quiet times" of day or week, when one could go and pray and just listen to the waterfall (yes, there's a smaller one inside the building as well as the big ones, with the pond, outside).

There's also been mention of putting a vending machine in there where one could buy little communion packets with a piece of bread and a tiny cup of juice; my opinion is that if there were a place to just take one (or purchase with a nominal sum) and an offering box next to it, they'd probably make more money that way and it wouldn't rob the largely-impecunious student/youth population of the experience. Idea: a vending machine that will take a student's (or any church member's?) ID card swipe as a form of payment, with a limitation of maybe 23 hours between uses (an hour's grace for those who come every day at nearly the same time). Complications abound and, at any rate, I digress.

Were it not for the general imperative that my spouse and I not be separated outside our home city (very long story), I would have basically lived at that prayer house all my waking hours while we were there. Even as things were, I got in several blessed sessions of decent length.

Every time I could relax enough to listen for Him (all except once), He was there, and I was in a place (not just physically) to receive Him. Things started to be revealed to me.

For a while, I'd heard people talking about The Anointing coming upon them in physical ways and, though I did (and still do) have my own peculiar physical manifestations (Maybe I'm a "Lefty"), there seemed always to be a theme among others of a fire-like sensation in the hands that I'd not experienced at all, and I had been both puzzled and dismayed.

Well, it came.

It didn't feel like a painful kind of burning, nor did it feel like sizzling per se, but it was more than just tingling or the feeling of a pulse. When I jotted down an exceedingly brief note of what had happened just after the fact, I wrote, "fire on hands" (not "hands on fire"). There was a sensation of tongues of flame licking but without the actual burning or hurting that one would normally expect to accompany it. It was a fairly strong sensation and felt quite unusual. When it faded away, it went out of my right hand before my left, and the last places it lingered were the left thumb and first two fingers, all the way up at the tips.

Now, what actually came of it? Nothing thus far. I've only tried using it three times, though, so it almost doesn't even count. Actually, I'm really glad it hasn't begun yet because I don't yet know how to carry it, especially now that I'm back in an environment where I'm not surrounded by a "Kingdom culture," full of resources and support. I just got a small taste when I was there.

I got a small taste of a great many glorious things during this trip. More to come.


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So Much News to Give

We had our first trip to Bethel Church this past weekend. Three wonderful days of church (real church!), prayer, and fasting (for me, at least).

I have much to post including pics, miracles worked in me, and many other experiences & thoughts thereon.

Without faith, it would be difficult to believe all that happened for us there. But, having traveled through Buddhism, agnosticism, atheism, and a couple more different mindsets to new life in Jesus, perhaps I'm in a decent situation to try and convey these things for believers and nonbelievers alike.

Also, much love to two new friends, C. G. and M. R.

_______

Sneak Peek
He gave me a word:

Let there be respect for measures of time, but let time only be given measure.

All things important are given without measure: Holy Spirit without measure, mercy without measure, love without measure. Measures of distance across the planet have been largely overcome with high-speed transport and the internet. Our big limitation in being put here on the earth is our being confined to time as it exists for us. That's the only real obstacle with which we have to contend in bringing His heavenly will to our hungry, desperate, longing world.

Measures of space, however, do provide beautiful analogies through which I'll someday soon be able to explain ways of thinking mathematically that will point the way to God, and then to right relationship with Him, especially for the math-minded.

The equations already started coalescing this past weekend at Bethel. So close I can almost taste them.

Praise and glory to the Lord!

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Bethel Church, Trip 1

First Trip to Bethel Church in Redding, CA
March 2009

For the sake of organization in future months, let this serve as an index for posts about this visit.

Posts will be listed in the order in which they're posted (oldest first). New stuff will be added to the end of the list so that once I've written the full scope of what I can, there will be a full index here. Hazzah.


So Much News to Give

Alabaster House; Fire on Hands

Devilweeding

Into Love

Glimpse




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