Walking it Out.

My friend, Seeking, recently wrote a blog post about a distance between herself & God & I began thinking, that if we were brutally honest, we all have those times.

I do ~ because I have trouble maintaining relationships, full stop.  They exhaust me ~ even good ones, ones I like & enjoy, people I love, people I actually want to spend time with.  That I still have a marriage in the light of this is something of a miracle!

My relationship with God also suffers from this & is further complicated by unhealed emotional wounds that satan likes to grab hold of to torment. It has nothing to do with faith or belief.  I decided a long time ago that even if someone could prove absolutely, beyond all reasonable doubt, that God was a fake & the turgid manifestation of someone's overactive imagination, I would still believe in Him because that is a far, far better option than a world without Him.  Without Him we have only ourselves & that is a truly horrifying thought. Left to our own devices we turn our world into a living nightmare. We do.  Not God. The world God made was good.  It functioned as it ought.  We were the ones who made the choice to change that.

So I was perfectly happy to chug along having my personal relationship with God & all was well, & all was well. I actually got to the point where I was no longer freaking out anytime God spoke to me ~ & then that all changed. He called me into ministry.

Now the weird thing about all this is that in many ways I had been in ministry for years & years ~ only we never called it that & it never really shoved me out of my comfort zone because all my training was in literature & words & even going to bible college didn't really change that.

 I never envisioned anything more than blogging away with the occasional preaching spot just to keep me on my toes.  What's more God never told me He wanted me to start a church.  He told the MOTH that & I got dragged along because as the MOTH pointed out caustically, He hasn't said no, has He? No He hadn't, but I have suffered constantly from the feeling God has made the most enormous mistake ~ please, I do know God doesn't make mistakes.  I didn't say my feelings were right or logical or anything but what they are: my feelings.

My feelings scream I'm the most wrong person for this sort of work ever.  Who in their right mind would ask a people shy introvert to step into a job that involves more people contact than most? I could bleat that it's just downright cruel. I feel absolutely inadequate for the job I have been asked to do & because I feel like I'm doing such a lousy job, letting God down, my flesh get in the way, yadda, yadda because we all know where that's coming from, don't we? it affects my relationship with my Father.

Now I know, just as you do, that this is all absolute nonsense.  I can sprook all the right bible verses ~ & plenty of them~ but the battle is real.   Satan has plenty of ammunition: other churches, other Christians, other people, friends & family hitting against an inherent weakness because he has been trying hard to take me out & in all honesty the only reason he hasn't managed to do that is because the MOTH is absolutely convinced I'm where God wants me.

All of which, surprise, surprise, sends me into covert. Satan is sneaky.  He points out our small numbers.  He points out how much we are gossiped about.  He points out the people who come & go like a revolving door.  He tries to point out that we have no voice, & make no conceivable difference.

I'm a person who likes things to be clear & understandable so not understanding why God chose me, out of all the people available to Him, all of whom I'm quite sure could do a much, much better job has devastated me. After all...see previous paragraph.

I was perfectly happy to have God show me the things He was going to do, to give me insight & revelation about scripture, to pray.  I was far less happy to be asked to act on all that! Are you ready for the crunch?

When God called me, He called me as a prophet.  I don't call myself that.  What the Church means by *prophet*, & what I understand God to mean by that term are 2 very different things. It has created a great deal of confusion & I am only now just starting to unravel the muddle because I wasn't raised charismatic & I have had to learn all this on the fly.

There are 3 aspects to this muddle.

The first is a series of things I saw in prayer while in Bible college & they were to do with a Great Awakening in Australia. I'm a Big Picture thinker & that's how I saw this so there is nothing specific.  No dates.  No times.  No places. I saw it multiple times in 2 different ways & years later I have been reading confirmation from others who have seen the same thing.

The 2nd thing was a vision I saw.  It was very clear, very specific & confirmed later by both the MOTH & Rabqa, who saw nearly the identical thing.  We thought God was showing us something about our church.  I now believe this is wrong & the why of that is the 3rd thing.

Preachers, like other occupations, have specialties.  Evangelists preach salvation; healers, healing; worshippers, worship, givers, giving.   I got holiness & the Holy Spirit.  Yes, I preach on other things but I constantly default to holiness & the Holy Spirit.

Some time back I got from the Spirit to preach on the Glory of God ~ which I did.  I'm no expert but I did my research, listened to revivalists, read my scripture.  Among the things that God turned up for me was this quote from Charles Haddon Spurgeon: "It would be very easy to prove that revivals of religion have usually been accompanied, if not caused, by a considerable amount of preaching out of doors, or in unusual places."

What I now think we were shown was revival/awakening, rather than our church per se. It explains a lot of the other stuff that keeps coming at us ~ & why we are doing the open air preaching: we were obedient to the call. It explains why satan is so desperate to try & grow distance between me & God ~ & all I can say to that is he never learns from his mistakes.  Every time he's taken on God he's lost, & lost badly.

So I'm doing what I always do: regroup.  I do get it is about doing what I'm called to do ~ I just get grumpy that it is so hard to do what is necessary & right.  I can't say I wasn't warned though.  As Jesus pointed out, If they hated me, they will hate you.  I'd best get used to it.