After years of praying and hours of driving, I am finally in Kansas City. As I write, I am gleeful because it has been an amazing adventure living and going to school in Kansas City. Within just two short weeks the Lord has really revealed himself to me in new and amazing ways.
I started this blog because there’s just so much stuff going on and I really feel called to share my journey and not just summarize it in a quick e-mail.
First of all, let me just comment on the things that first caught my attention here. When my mom and I were driving to my new home I heard this loud, roaring sound and I thought man that is a loud lawn mower. Come to find out that is no lawn mower but actual bugs called cicadas. I am still not used to them. Then there were thunder storms that lit up my room at night. Another interesting experience was not just seeing a sign for umpteenth time that says “deer crossing’ but actually seeing a deer crossing the road in front of my car. The look on his face unmistakably meant, “What are you doing here?”
Orientation
Day one, morning one I am standing in line to pay for the semester and I meet Tia and Sarah. A couple minutes later I met Danae (pronounced “Deny”) and her room mate Angel. Since that meeting, these girls have been my buddies. I know it’s been a short time but we held fast to each other and have really gone deep with each other already. Tia and I are in TCI, which means that automatically spend more time together. The other girls are in other programs. But even when we’re separated we find ways to hang out and share life together. I’m so glad we came across each other!
This has been the most Spirit filled orientation ever! What I mean by that is that the teachers didn’t just give information, but after they spoke (sometimes even before) they would ask the Holy Spirit to come and make those truths a reality to our hearts. That first night was called “Consecration Charge” but really should have been called “deal with your sin night.” There was so much repentance and the Holy Spirit’s manifest presence filled the room. I felt like the Lord personally broke some strongholds in my life and set me free to worship him.
At the end of the night they had us spread across the room and the prophetic team came and shared words they had gotten for us. The first lady said that the Lord told her I have songs in my heart. She specifically said I’m a singer and a songwriter. Instantly after she left the Lord started speaking to me, affirming me in who I am. He revealed to me a pattern of comparison I had had in my heart. Then he just spoke identity over me.
Maybe this is a good time clear up confusion about Ihop, Ihopu, and fcf. There’s a church called Forerunner Christian Fellowship, which Mike Bickle pastors. Ihop is the prayer room (called here GPR, which stands for global prayer room), which the Lord prophesied to him would exist in the 80s when he was pastoring another church. Ihopu came out of the prayer room in order to train up night and day worshippers who would proclaim God’s kingdom to the world.
Anyway, if you have any questions about Ihop, please don’t hesitate to ask. Now that I’m here I have language for the heart of ihop, which is also my heart for the nations.
That Saturday the SGA set up a fun scavenger hunt for us to get to know the area better. Before this I really prayed that God would allow me to meet people and form more friendships. All orientation I had been hanging out with the same group of girls that I met in the morning but not really making any new friends. When I got there they asked if I was a driver or not and I said yes. So by the grace of God I ended up sitting by myself, away from my friends in the driver section and a group of students was assigned to me.
Side note: it was actually both amusing and nerve wracking as the girl next to me was talking to girls standing up behind me about “rigging it” so that they could all be together. I was nervous because I really didn’t want these girls to feel like they were stuck in my group. But those girls (thankfully) were not in my group.
I was so excited when I got to meet Lauren, Eric, Taylor, and Micah. We had more of a blast (I think) getting to know each other than doing the actual game, although, that certainly didn’t fall on the wayside. Taylor already lives here so we had that covered. I discovered that Lauren is a graduate of APU and Micah is sisters with my friend Sue who goes to APU and lead my Mexico team this last spring. Also, Lauren, Micah, and Eric are on the higher end of the age scale, which I find awesome because everyone I have met is either 18 or 19.
I discovered possibly one of the worst ways to find out your new friend is prophetic. The story goes as follows: I attended a game night that SGA put on for the new students where there were various organized sports to play. I had played a little volleyball in the hot Kansas City sun and I decided to go inside the gym to watch a game of dodge ball, which was already in progress. Anyway, I watched for a while and Micah asked, “Why aren’t you playing?” My response was, “I don’t want to get pelted with balls!” He said, “That happens in every sport.” Of course it could happen I agreed. But the likelihood was a lot less.
A while later, I proceeded along with a couple others to play volleyball. We were about to start a new game but we hadn’t started yet. We were just trying to figure out teams and such, when I turned around I got slammed straight in the face with a volleyball.
While everyone else panicked and came around me I just stood there. I was perfectly calm and collected. Not even embarrassed (which is extremely unusual). Instead, my first thought (and I think I said it) was, “Am I blind?” Then I realized that I had just lost my contact. Someone retrieved it for me. There was this weird greyish blur that didn’t go away the entire day from the corner of my eye. No worries! I am not blind.
I am, however, now known as the girl who got hit in the head with the volleyball. It’s like every other day that someone asks me, “How’s your eye?” It’s pretty funny.
Classes
Monday through Wednesday we have a class called Forerunner Curriculum, which is basically a big picture spread of theology and biblical truths. On the second day of class Wes Hall, our teacher, in the middle of his teaching starts to slur his words. There’s a moment where he started to laugh. Then he just tells us that the Holy Spirit is on him in a powerful way. He tries to continue and keeps slurring his words and then laughing. At one point he suddenly stops and kind of bends over, he gets up laughing. He tries to resume his notes but then looks out on all of us and asks, “Is the Holy Spirit resting on any of you in a powerful way.” A bunch of hands go in the air. Some people are doubled over laughing at this point and others shouting in the spirit.
So then, he has us all stand and he prays over us as the Lord downloads words of knowledge into him about the situation. If I remember correctly, he tries after this to get back to his notes and then gets slammed with another wave of the Holy Spirit. He says, “I want to get through my notes.” He of course says that this exactly what he was just talking about “the suddenly’s of God.” A huge ministry time ensues. It was incredible! So incredible that even after a class was way over, Wes Hall was wandering around the halls laying his hands on people.
At the end of class Wes explains (he does things very Vineyardy) that it wasn’t about the experience of God’s presence—falling, laughing, shaking, groaning, or getting flung around (he calls those tokens of his presence)--but God was after something deeper. He was after real heart transformation.
The next day he took the first 30 minutes of class to allow people to share testimonies about the day before. Sure enough, real heart transformation happened. One girl had gotten raped everyday for 7 years and she got up and shared how the Lord had set her free from bitterness and depression. That’s just one of a bunch of testimonies of breakthroughs that day! As you looked at her she was literally beaming. There were some physical healings too. A back and a thyroid problem were completely healed.
Then we have Life of Prayer with Corey Russel on Thursdays. We were an hour into the class and he had gotten to page 2 on the syllabus. He had shared his radical testimony about how he was saved and he just felt like giving us the “secrets” he had learned in life. There was just so much wisdom spilling out of him I couldn’t stop writing. Then at the end of class he had us pray for those who hadn’t received their prayer language yet. Again the presence of the Lord was so thick in the room and I didn’t want to leave. I was almost late for my next class because of this!
TCI practicum….oh man. I don’t even know how to explain it. Lou Engle is this incredible, prophetic man. He came and spoke about the Call. Basically, if you don’t know what the Call is, the Lord visited Lou in 1999 and told him to call the nation back to God. Through walking with the Lord he has led these solemn assemblies and God has highlighted in each of them areas that he is pinpointing (basically idols in America) that need to be repented of and destroyed through prayer and fasting. One of these areas (still a big one) is abortion, which is why every Friday we are required to stand outside Planned Parenthood (ooo and God has been moving on these prayers…more to come!!!).
You can start by partnering in prayer with me now for the Call in Detroit. Its going to be on 11/11/11. I’ll explain more about that in a later post. Suffice to say, the Lord is moving in our midst and I’m so excited to be under this prophetic mantle. As Lou put it (about soaking up annointings), “I was in Dick Eastman’s living room. You are now in my living room.”
Oh! And on Friday I got to hear Dick Eastman share on his journey to starting 24/7 intercessory worship. I really encourage you to read his book that just came out called Intercessory Worship. I don’t want to share everything he shared here as I’m already sharing so much but this stuff is so good! Suffice to say he is one of the forerunners of what Ihop does now. No one had ever heard of intercessory worship and when the Lord revealed to him that they was how he was going to call the nations to himself. Powerful stuff. Anyway, I’ll be talking more about that in coming posts.
Built into TCI is a “class” specifically devoted to the sharing of prophetic dreams and the interpretation of those dreams. Sam Cerny leads this. Its called Dream Stream. It comes out of both a biblical understanding of prayer and experience in the Call. The basic premise is that God does not want to hide information from us (Gen. 18:17). You receive the things you ask for. Again, there’s a whole teaching in this. I could literally take pages but I won’t.
Treasure Hunt
After TCI practicum on Saturday the strike students (Sam’s second year students who are basically intercessory missionaries) lead a treasure hunt. Now I don’t know if you’re familiar with these but we do them at the Vineyard (or did) all the time. The basic format is you sit and ask the Lord who you’re to minister to and then you go and do it. I was so stoked about this because I had been praying since I got here about doing a treasure hunt! The Lord has really burdened my heart for the city. When I found out they do it I was ecstatic!
Their format is on a piece of paper everyone writes the categories: places, names, miscellaneous, and description. After that (and I’ll talk about this next post) we sang in the Spirit for 5 minutes. So we did this and then she just said, “now write whatever comes to mind.” In my mind I was super skeptical. Of course this is all going to be me! I thought. Oh me of little faith. One for the first things I got was “brick wall” for a place, then “Richard.”
There were a lot of encounters before this but I’ll just share the awesomeness that resulted from my word. We had been out for a while and someone in our group had had the place “bank” so we saw one and all felt like we were supposed to go there (which is interesting since there was a bank we saw earlier that we didn’t go to). When we got there a guy was walking out of the bank and my fellow TCIer Greg, filled with the spirit (I’m not kidding. He was bold and correct), asked, “Is your name Brandon by any chance?” because that was a name that was on his list. The guy goes, “No. My name’s Richard.”
Right then and there I almost died I was so shocked. I should have showed him but I was shocked I couldn’t. Anyway, I just kept nodding as the group explained that his name was on the list. We told him about bank, his name, and I mentioned “brick wall” because the bank was brick. He was pretty much the same smiling person the whole time. But then we asked him if he needed prayer for anything. He didn’t think so. We prodded further “work? Healing? Family?” He said his sister and aunt have diabetes and that he is pretty happy at work. We prayed for him. Then Greg asked if he knew Jesus. The short story was that the guy wasn’t ready yet to receive Jesus but God had clearly set him up. We told him this and that God would continue to pursue him because he loves him so much. Richard received all of this. It was wonderful!
Last Night
Best ever! Autumn cleaning out her clothes closet while Daniel cleans the garage as I sit in my room basement bedroom right across from them. Apparently Daniel has a thing for shoes and buys her like these really fashionable shoes. So he was arguing with her about how unfashionable a pair was that she was showing him. It was absolutely hysterical.
In the meantime Autumn is throwing me all these clothes that she doesn’t want, including this beautiful prom dress. Of course, I have nothing to wear it to. But as soon as I see it my first thought (like any other girl who loves to play dress up) is to try it on. And what do you know? It fits! Again, I have no idea where I am going to wear it but as soon as I put it on I felt like a princess and I just couldn’t part with it. Ah! You should never hang out with people when they are getting ready to move.
For real though, last night the Lord encountered me in his presence. Dick Eastman had just spoken basically the same message as before but the Spirit was really stirring in the room. This time he had us all get out our prayer maps that his organization had made and had us break into groups and strategically pray for the countries so that every nation was covered. On the map its split up by dates so that you can pray for like 5 or something countries a day. Well, he had each person pray for the day that the birthday is in the month. Anyway, as we’re praying and crying out for the nations I just start weeping uncontrollably. I’ve been learning a lot about a particular type of prayer called travail (which is where you are birthing souls into salvation) and was in the midst of wondering if that’s what this is when one of the Ihop leaders gets on the mic and says that we need to pray for the unsaved in our own families. There it was! The rest of the night (even after my friends left) I just sat there, and Misty prophesied as she sang over me (unbeknownst to her) on the mic.
