Doing a New Thing

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but I will do my best to explain and am confident that the Holy Spirit within you will help you to interpret and understand this new thing.  I have been released from staffing the DTS.  As much as I adore the students and working with them, as determined as I was to make the DTS kitchen an offering to God for His glory, as excited as I am about discipling the people who will bring God's justice to the nations, the things that I have been doing have been in conflict with the things God wants to do in me.  So, in obedience to my leaders and the Lord who love me deeply, I have stepped down from staffing the school.

Several words have been spoken over this season...which is to say that as I and my friends from all different places pray for me, the same themes keep coming up.  I would like to share with you some of these themes so that you can pray into them, speak into them, and celebrate with me the sacred honor I am being given.

• Urgency- God is jealous for me, and His intensity toward me seems apparent to all the people around me (this is the part which I, quite frankly, don't yet comprehend).
• Inner healing- I am being given a vision for the healing God wants to do in my life that is different from anything I have experienced before.  The model I have always known is to go back to a painful memory and have God touch that pain.  This is a long process, especially for survivors of extreme trauma (to whom I am called) and I (and many others) have been praying for a faster way.  As always, God likes to train me through my own experience.  He will do in me first what He wants to do through me.  I'll share more as I understand. 
• Peace- I have asked specifically for authority over the things (of the world, flesh, and demonic) which come against people's minds.  Of course that authority is the peace of Christ which guards our hearts and minds.  Peace is, overwhelmingly, the word I hear most often when people pray.  It is a difficult process, because in order to experience true peace, God must first disarm all my defenses and efforts at false peace.  Ugh.  I have experienced bits of the peace He is bringing me into (Glory be to Jesus) but at the moment, the process does not feel like peace at all. 
• Receive- This is the word I hear most in my own prayers, and it is, for me, the most difficult part.  God has brought it to my attention that since I was a little girl I have been giving (and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and...). Now I come with empty, open hands.  It is a daily...sometimes hourly... discipline.

Practically speaking, my tasks on base have shifted significantly.  Our guidance committee met with me this week and will continue to meet with me, helping me navigate this season.  I am dedicating time to receive from the Lord.  The base guidance committee has encouraged me to focus on raising support, which is a huge blessing because I will get to spend time connecting with the people I love; I also need to make sure my financial needs are getting met.  I will still facilitate the staff development department, which brings me great joy; I have other tasks which help me continue in orienting to the base and YWAM as an organization.  I am no longer staffing the DTS outreach to Nigeria, which means we are back to the drawing board on my new staff outreach.  I will bring this up in my next meeting with the guidance committee.

I have grown tremendously in the week since this decision was made.  The month and a half of staffing the DTS was joyous and difficult, and I feel like I am enjoying the fruit of submitting to God in both the joys and difficulties.  I believe the Spirit is telling me that I am to enjoy the fruit of my hands in this season, the fruit of years of loving and serving the Lord, and that from this fruit we will plant a vineyard.  The ending of the 1995 moving French Kiss has been haunting me since I got to California.  The character Kate is more like me than any other character I have seen in any other movie.  The entire movie is available on YouTube...click here to spoil the entire movie and see the ending.  The cute one with the blond hair is me.  Kevin Kline will be playing the lover, who for me is the God who Knows Me, is jealous for me, and longs to have me as His bride.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.

And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’

And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy.  I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. 

And you shall know the Lord.  

-Hosea 2:14-16, 19-20

I will restore her vineyards, and she will know that she is my bride, not my servant.

-Prophetic word spoken over the group I was gathered with last night