MY CHRISTMAS DECLARATION

Take up your cross, and make your vow...

For justice carries mercy
And mercy acts in love
And love is what defines the
means by which the justice does

And thereby I have come here
that true love might be known
For joy is set before me
at last the day has come

And here I come with Love before me
And pain aside, my joy my glory
I can see it now, my precious cross, my vow
and finally I have come to the altar of my love ...

This is my blood, poured out for you
This is my body, broken for you ...
-- Audra Lynn, Vow, Prologue (at last)

SHOUT:   LET THE EARTH BE FILLED WITH HIS GLORY! LET THE STANDARD OF THE LORD BE REVEALED!

TODAY every created thing remembers their Creator and longs to see the face, to be One with the One who dreamed them and their destiny. Today may destiny be revealed, and every created thing rejoice to discover that we are His chosen instruments of peace on Earth, good will toward mankind. May we cling desperately to the One whose birth we celebrate today, who was born to wash us in His own innocent blood, born to clean us of what impedes justice and mercy, born to save us from being instruments of destruction! Behold, HE makes All things New!

Let the one who has set himself to overthrow the throne of Love be reminded today that his time is at an end -- as every attempt to breed strife, to dishonor the celebration of the One who defeated him comes to nothing and and peace reigns today on Earth in Us as never before.

In my own life:
The plans of the enemy have been destroyed. Poverty has been destroyed and prosperity grows quickly from seeds planted joyfully in faith, to honor the throne of Heaven. That agreement, that covenant is rooted and grounded in Love, and beauty and plenty and abundance and fertility spring forth with every step I take into the future. My seed is blessed and multiplies, and the fruit of my life is laid at His feet as an offering to His Great Faithfulness to me. My children are overtaken by mercy and grace and leave bitterness and loss behind -- it drops to the ground, becoming fertilizer for fruitfulness as their hands reach toward the light of Your love.

My seed grows up strong and agile in wind and rain, and adversity is nothing to them. You've captured them in the sun of Your love, they reach for it and they prosper; their branches are heavy with fruit that will adorn the table you have set for me in the presence of my enemies.

Around that table are gathered my children, my beloved co-laborers, my sisters and friends and their families, the elderly who honor my table by allowing me to show them the love You showed me when You gave Your life to do for me what I could not do for myself; these are the ones you have given me, and not one of them is lost. And along the length of the table is carved this testimony:

BLESSED IS SHE WHO PUT HER TRUST IN ME


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Warpath through a rainstorm

I have gained such a victory over the enemy that I have to write about it. I would have to say that it is world-class, and it’s important enough that it might even change the course of history for me and for others, too.

The fact that I was able to hear God on this is stunning. I attribute it to my church family praying for me. It was so important that I don’t know how I didn’t ignore it totally.

Yep, that’s exactly what I meant to write.

There have been people in my world who seemed to bring rain with them wherever they go. Up until this point in my life I would pray and pray for God to release me from them because their negativity was so profoundly oppressive. He used to do that, but it was never pretty. For the past few years though He didn't seem that worried about my feelings. Especially since I decided that I have to master speaking the truth in love if I want to walk in answered prayer.

It's like this: If we pray according to His will we know He hears us and we have what we ask.

His will is Mercy because He loves. He loves with a generosity that is mind boggling and He won't hear me work against His agenda in prayer. Doing it His way is a lot more satisfying than doing it my way -- what a waste of time and breath and everything. My way. Rubbish.

So, a few months ago I had a random encounter that changed my life forever. I was on my way to work and I had a piece of mail in my hand. I saw the mail carrier and asked her could she take it. Her hand reached out reluctantly and the barometric pressure changed. A bitter cloud drifted across her eyes that never met mine, but as she looked for a place to lay the blame for what was troubling her she found my hand. No words, but oh, her meaning was unmistakable.

I walked on, caught in the rain. I heard myself, defensive and full of self-doubt, starting to criticize her in my mind, giving it right back to her. Then all the sudden a lightning bolt of revelation hit me: she never saw me because she was being tormented in her mind by a storm of accusation, lies and judgment leveled against everyone and everything around her.

She had entertained these lies as an explanation for the cause of the cloud she'd seen pass through others’ eyes all her life; it had fended off feeling misunderstood, abused, condemned. All this I could see clearly, felt the weight of it, but thanks be to God, in that moment He showed me ME, my own sites trained on her, more than ready in my own defense to take up the same accusations against her. Before I knew it I had shifted my eyes off of her and onto the source of her torment and began speaking life and healing and protection over her mind. Immediately I felt the weight of the judgment flee and the sun come out again.

The Spirit brought to mind the scripture on resisting the devil as I watched his flight away from the whole situation. I could feel the change in her heart toward me and the relief and lightness of joy replacing it in her, and me -- just as I had felt the heavy bitterness in her spirit a moment before and my own bitterness rise to meet it. A whole layer of darkness was removed from my own spiritual eyes right then and I could finally see the point in being able to discern spirits. It was paradigm-shattering.

This began a running discussion with the Holy Spirit that has carried on up to now, but it didn’t seem to be growing easier to distinguish and extinguish the daily, sometimes hourly battles that take place in the spirit realm. I have still struggled with my response to people who seemed to ooze wild, arbitrary judgment against me, and didn’t really like my progress at all until I found myself explaining it to my dear friend Denise in detail as if I had known, before that moment, what the problem was.

With uncanny regularity I have experienced that if I will pray peace and safety over a person's mind and confess to God that I know it is not them causing me pain but a lie that they are being tormented with, it all just dissipates. Poof. But get this: often I would rather let that person oppress me and judge them for it than to pray peace and protection over their mind and not experience the pain. It was too much work and frankly I didn’t want to be responsible for their well-being. I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for the way they acted toward me.

That was the revelation.

Nasty isn’t it?

But no more. Today, in front of God, the brethren, angels and vermin I totally accept my spiritual authority in the atmosphere around me. I accept my post as an ambassador of the Kingdom of God, and I wield His authority to forgive sin in the lives of people I come in contact with who are tormented. I will administer grace and peace to them and they will be set free on my watch. I will no longer succumb to those lies and I will not grieve the Spirit by being lazy about what I know to be true or pretending that I have no authority in the matter.

And I am going on the warpath, for real. Care to join me?

Post surgery

Yesterday I listened to Keith Moore preach on the word of faith, and after Steve Backlund’s message on the same subject it made sense to me in a way it never had before. I heard God telling me to send His Word like He does. Not just to repeat it, but to SEND it, and it will accomplish what it was sent to do. That is what He wants me to do. He wants me to have the things I have prayed for, and He wants me to prophesy to the dry bones and watch them gather flesh around them.

I have a faith in me. He has put His faith in me. He lives in me and reigns through me, and whatever used to be has disappeared like a dream in the light of day.

After surgery I pulled up the Arnott’s podcasts to hear what the enemy had thought to steal from me. Imagine how he had planned to destroy my faith with worry and despair. He thought to crush me, maybe even to cause me to die prematurely from fear of the future. This story is going to be in Steve Backlund’s biography of the devil -- What was it called? “It Backfired, Again”, and as I heard Carol talk about intimacy I heard Him again, calling me into His arms to conceive Kingdom authority, to give birth to His word made flesh in me.

new coursework

So this little set of scriptures has intrigued me for as long as I can remember. It's kind-of a riddle, kind-of a treasure map, that much I know:


Proverbs 3:19 By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations,
by understanding he set the heavens in place;
20] by his knowledge the watery depths were divided,
and the clouds let drop the dew.

Proverbs 24:3 By wisdom a house is built,
and through understanding it is established;
4] through knowledge its rooms are filled
with rare and beautiful treasures.


God is going to show me how this works -- and I will tell you what He shows me.

posture

Today I am waiting for Monday. I am going to have surgery on my foot then. I don't know what these days will bring to me but I am going to take the position that God is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endures throughout all generations. I have decided to default to faith, to trusting Him. It is from that posture that I am able to discover what He means when He says that I will never be put to shame.

I don’t pray for the trouble not to come -- I pray for it not to move me. To me, in reality this is invaluable, to not be moved by adversity. To me this is the foundation of a fearless life.

That seems to be the primary focus, the main lesson I am being taught right now. I remember earlier on in my faith life I would be frantic, all the while knowing that God promised me that I would be protected, safe. I had a disjointed reality -- double minded. I remember longing to be able to abandon the fear, to lean totally on the Word and its promises. It seemed like since I knew that it would be ok, it was wasting a lot of energy to be anxious. It seemed like it made more sense to skip the anxiousness and go straight to peace and contentment -- and it became my goal.

I feel like this is something along the lines of a final exam. It's not THE final exam -- but for me to be able to move on to the next portion of my life I have to face apparent adversity without wavering. From that point I can begin to take ground. This immovability is accompanied by a mind that defaults to grace, that doesn't rattle with negativity when I feel threatened. It means a mouth that isn't tricked into saying things that are not gracious. I have to be able to side with God in my mind and in my mouth, not just eventually, but immediately, in order to move forward.

There is also a discipline that is needed. I have prayed for it, but for whatever reason have not been able to grasp it. -- It really is a complete retooling of my thought process. This ankle has helped me build a foundation for order. There are now good reasons for me to be more disciplined and I am being driven to order my steps more carefully. Out of this experience comes a change in my desire, and not far behind that will be strategies for accomplishing what I was incapable of doing before.

My faith life and growth are premised on grace, on pushing HARD against feeling pressured to 'do something', to perform some act to prove my virtue or devotion, to put my trust in following rules. No matter how hard I try to do the right thing I am not big enough to know what the right thing is -- I can't see with the scope that takes. The LAW can't do what grace can do. The inclination to do what God wants me to do has to be written by His finger on my heart, individually, privately. Less than that is an impotent gesture. There is a Teacher, a Comforter, a Come-Along-Side Friend who is in me guiding me to do His pleasure -- that is a foundational principle of God's Kingdom, it is the one thing that sets His throne above every other throne -- that He will do in us what we cannot do for ourselves. Actually, we are evaluated purely on the basis of whether we trust Him to DO IT -- whatever IT may be in any given situation -- in us and through us. The better I get at cooperating with God's plan, the more useful I am to Him.

This is total insanity to the world, to the kingdom of this world. Its laws and rules won't even entertain this position -- it is foolishness, it is dangerous. I have to lose all hope of riding the fence between these two worlds, because it is impossible to do both -- I am either doing it my way or I am waiting on Him to do something for me and through me.

So my broken ankle is a tether to Him. I am bound more tightly to Him, and ever farther removed from the kingdom of this world. I am all in, I am too far along to be able to turn back. I feel the seriousness of my decision to not take action. I have decided that I will see this through to its real conclusion, and my main effort now is to abandon any course of action that might skew the results. If I am saved, if I am delivered, it won't be because I figured it out.

I am studying NOT to figure it out -- and that is work in itself. But now that I am too far gone to save myself I have made it easier on myself to 'stay my hand' from action.

At the end of this is a stability that is useful. It is producing a confidence in me that can withstand whatever the enemy can send my way. I am determined to be a 'repairer of the breach, a restorer of paths to dwell in'. I am determined that when I open my mouth something will come out that will comfort and strengthen and light the eyes of understanding in others. I am determined to be tethered to Christ, His bondslave, useful to Him, of no value but what He does in me. That is my aspiration and my life's work, and I am determined that He has permission to do whatever He pleases to build that in me. I cannot do it, but I can consent to whatever means He is pleased to use to do it in me.

decisions

12-11-10 my life changed forever -- and it didn’t really take much to do it.

John and Carol Arnott were at GCC. I was walking toward the bus stop and my right foot went down on a patch of ice and flew out. As I fell I saw my ankle wobble sideways and knew it was broken before I hit the ground. It was literally one of those ‘time slowed down’ experiences. And thus began my new life.

A man stopped to help me. I told him my ankle was broken. Another man, someone I recognized as one of the homeless guys who stay around here, came to help too. He really was the hero of the whole thing -- he made the other guy give him his cell phone, called 911, got the ambulance. I protested that I couldn’t afford an ambulance and he began telling me that there was provision for people who couldn’t afford medical care.

A woman walked by and asked if she could pray for me. I said Yes, please do -- I was on my way to the conference when this happened. She began to pray, and the woman who was in her car at the bank came to pray (I slipped right in front of the community bank, landing at the corner, right in front of the gutter spout -- and she couldn’t get out) and the homeless guy came to pray too. The woman on her way to the conference wanted me to come on to the conference, tried to get the woman in the car to drive us, but the homeless guy kept saying, “DONT MOVE” and finally I realized that I could not get up and get into a car -- my foot was flopping uncomfortably at the end of my leg and I knew I couldn’t make it into a car. The only alternative I had was to agree to go in the ambulance.

The police woman who came to the scene started snapping pictures, the homeless guy gave her his name as a witness and told me so. The ambulance got there and I asked them to take me to Stroger and they said they couldn’t. I remembered a few weeks earlier my new friend Deb told the story of her ex husband James when he had two successive strokes, how they had been taken care of at Loyola and helped financially. So I asked them to take me to Loyola and they said they could take me there.

Once I was there they said I had made the right decision because they have expertise in bones -- and I would need surgery. I kept making it clear that I had no insurance so nobody asked me for my card. They took care of me quickly, efficiently, and told me they were going to get me a spot as early as possible for surgery.

I made my way home alone; no family, no insurance, no money, and a huge medical situation looming imminent. But instead of fear, excitement began welling up in me.
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Here's an amazing thing:  I only discovered how trustworthy God is after my ankle snapped and the thing that I most feared happened. I watched God sweep into that moment like a rushing river and begin to carry me into a revelation of who He is through it.
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Mark Chironna said at a Kim Clement conference last May 28th that pain (by which he also meant the helplessness, grief, loss and fear pain wrenches out of us) is the locus of real praise -- the moment it is able to be conceived. He said this (re: elisha taking up the mantle of the double portion) "You will never cross the threshold into a new level of kingdom authority without suffering loss. They won’t tell you this in Tulsa, but I’ll tell you in Chicago: Grief is God’s preparation for change. What looks like loss is actually gain, and grief opens a chiros moment. Job said as he was processing what had happened to him, 'Thou hast opened my ear in oppression.' When you go through a particularly dark, difficult season and the oppression of the enemy is bearing down on your soul, God will open your ear to hear him in a fresh way.  You learn how to differentiate between His voice and the lies of the enemy. (Those lies) have been part of the personal unconscious scripts you were hypnotized into believing because some authority figure told you 'this is reality, this is the way the world works'. You accepted it (as truth) because (an authority) said it, but it doesn’t match up with a Biblical worldview. God, in taking you through oppression, is (reorienting) you to (see the truth so you) flush that stuff out of your unconscious, bring it to your conscious awareness, dump the files and move on down the road because (lies prevent you from) seizing chiros moments."

A lot of things have happened to me, but until recently I still had youth and sensuality on my side to fend off disaster. It wasn't until my ankle snapped that I was able to experience HOW His strength is made perfect in weakness. It is no longer a tensely held theory I never want to have to rely on. Now I can relax, for the first time, like I have never relaxed before because I am seeing Him save me from what I truly fear, which is anything I am helpless to control.

It's true, what Chironna said. It's not popular doctrine, but it's Bible, and more useful in navigating the life of the Spirit than beliefs that seem right but end up landing you in a wrong place without knowing how you got there. That's the thing about things that seem right but aren't -- it makes it really hard to track the cause-and-effect relationship.

There is nothing I can do to protect myself from vulnerability and poverty and disaster today. I can barely use the crutches, I have to have surgery and have no idea how I am going to pay for it, and there's ice everywhere outside so I have no idea when I will be able to go back to work. The rent still needs paid, the world still goes round --

A perfect scenario for helplessness. A perfect proving ground for my new mantra: Those who trust in the LORD will never be put to shame. (I Peter 2:6)