June 27th seem to become an almighty important date on my calendar of events from early on in the year of 2009. It was the day I was honorably celebrating my dearest childhood friend's wedding as one of her bridesmaids. What seemed ever-so-odd to me was how this date seemed to arise over & over again throughout the course of my Spring. Mostly this date became known to conflict with just about every single “God opportunity” that was coming my way. I had to say no to a mission trip to Africa that I would’ve sold my kidney on the black market to attend because the dates conflicted. Then two really attractive conferences in California & Brazil seem to find their way into my viewfinder with my absolute favorite Jesus mentors leading and of course this too seem to conflict with the special date so I had to pass. A Jesus camping trip came & went on the table to options falling off the list because of dueling dates. There was no doubt in my mind, my commitment to my friend and the privilege to share in her day trumped all things, but man alive WHY must all these opportunities for Jesus that send my heart into instant fluttering palpitations conflict with such a concrete date that the Lord knew I would not compromise?? What did this mean? I don’t believe in coincidence and certainly even if one did, turning down 5 different things that all revolve around one date would have you guessing…what…on…earth…is the deal here? Does the world around me just have bad yearly planners or what?! I wondered and even pouted that these dates and events could not just stretch out a little bit more to accommodate me a little better! :) Essentially I came to peace with the idea that the Lord MUST have a doozie of a mission for me at this wedding, right?!? Naturally, that would be the deal since I had to say no to Jesus stuff to be in this wedding celebration…and surely God knows the desires of my heart to celebrate both my dear friend and HIM! Hmm, we’ll just have to see what unfolds as each day passes by.
So as the month of June progressed, I had some amazing dates with Jesus and he was certainly finding ways to love on me (as he so often does) in my small little world of Buckman, MN! One particular night was June 8th when I had the opportunity to combine two of my favorite things; praying for the women in my bible study group and attending Monday Night Prayer night at my church. One woman in particular that I have been thoroughly enjoying the journey of prayer with is my friend KC. We’ve had all to similar of a life journey. On the day the Lord administered his divine appointment for KC and I, I met KC in the front of our church, at the altar, before the Lord in prayer as strangers to learn she knows my heart and I hers and we connected in our pain to know instant kinship. She happened to be in the midst of great pain and loss due to multiple miscarriages and now the unexplainable experience of infertility when God ordained for us to meet last year. Soon he arranged for us to be in the same bible study so we could grow together. Over the course of this year I’ve had the privilege of watching her mature into her God given destiny and spiritual nourished life and it’s almost as if God’s given me eyes to watch my own journey unfold through her eyes, a supernatural seat behind the camera to see “me” in “her” as if he rewound the tape for me to enjoy his view of my life not all that long ago.
Okay, back to the calendar. This particular night on June 8th, she came to join me at my Monday Night Prayer meeting. As I’ve come to depend blindly upon the Lord and just expect him, he showed up in a powerful way that night as he often does, ruining both me & her in our intimate moments with Him, wrecked by the glory of his powerful love. I was given the gifted opportunity to pray for her like no other time before(and I have spent countless hours in prayer with her over the past year). God spoke so heavily through me and used me in all my weakness to release a powerful promise over KC that the glory alone of His words traveling through me left me in a state of drunken bliss from the touch of his hand, the whisper of his voice, the extension of his love, a kiss from the father to heal a broken child’s wound funneling through lil ole me. In this indescribable moment of frozen time He spoke his word that Psalm 128 was to be a part of his promise and new covenant with KC. I had never heard, nor seen, Psalm 128 in my life but it flew out of my mouth with such passion that I had to shout it with our without my consent it just came out. I grabbed my bible and set my eyes upon these irreplaceable words for the first time:
Psalm 128
How joyful are those who fear the Lord—all who follow his ways!
You will enjoy the fruit of your labor.
How joyful and prosperous you will be!
Your wife will be like a fruitful grapevine,
flourishing within your home.
Your children will be like vigorous young olive trees
as they sit around your table.
That is the Lord’s blessing for those who fear him.
May the Lord continually bless you from Zion.
May you see Jerusalem prosper as long as you live.
May you live to enjoy your grandchildren.
May Israel have peace!
Look again,
read twice, can you see it? Can you see the beauty of the promise from our Lord to a woman who has mourned the loss of 5 children who were stolen from her womb?! Can you see the new covenant being born of these words and the destiny she’s about to receive!! Immediately upon praying these words into her life, I nearly ran to the corner to hide like a dog with its tail between it’ legs because the POWER in the promise intimidated the LIFE outta me and I pleaded with him that it didn’t just randomly come from my brain. I begged the Lord that HE show this to KC, that HE meet her in every way imaginable to confirm the new covenant He’s promised in Psalm 128. Fast forward to that Sunday, she meets me at church in excitement and shares with me the Lord had sent her Psalm 128 THREE MORE TIMES that week in the most random ways she had no choice but to believe!!!! Beautiful, Thank YOU JESUS for your faithfulness! Fast forward another week to Father’s Day when KC meets me in the prayer room after Sunday mass and reveals to me;
she’s pregnant and she just learned it 10 minutes before coming to church that morning. Precisely 2 weeks after we prayed and she received God's new promises. She’s a wreck….so long we’ve prayed for this moment, so much growing she has done to come back to this place with a healed spirit, bandaged heart and so much fear is shoving its way into her soul that it’s choking the life out of the joy & peace that God planted there.
We prayed. We soaked in the love of our Father together, for 1 ½ hours we prayed & prayed & prayed until physical exhaustion and cloudy contacts ached in my eye sockets. The Lord MOVED inside that room and in our hearts and doted over his beautiful child like she was his absolute favorite precious gem. He alone eased her fears and revealed that it was HIS gift to her on HIS day, a baby for Father’s day was in his hearts desire. Again, I spent a week ruined by this amazing encounter between us and our indescribable God!
So needless to say, I’m doing good, coming into my “own” and climbing a step up the spiritual ladder during the course of these past couple weeks, being fed immensely by some amazing God moments and filling up my spiritual hunger through some royally awesome sermons of Bill Johnson’s, receiving much revelation of God’s plans in my life and for my life, really walking into a realm of authority in the kingdom that I never knew God was waiting for me to wake up and grab ahold of! Gloriously lost in Jesus land almost all the time, I had fallen away from the calendar of events for June. I recognize mid-week, HELLO, it’s the wedding week…and I’m ON FIRE for GOD, there has to be something GOOD COOKING in heaven’s pot, right?! I go to the wedding, eagerly seeking a divine appointment. I actually had a certain highschool friend on my heart, hoping God would open a door for me to minister to him. I sailed through the day and into the evening with no amazing God moments and I was beyond confused? This “date” felt so important for so many reasons and I thought surely one of those reasons was for God. I closed my evening at this wedding with a short conversation with the very friend I had hoped to see and minister too…to my surprise, he actually ministered to me by making a statement that God used to lift a veil, open my eyes and see my own life in a different light….to appreciate and love someone in my life to a greater degree and so I drove home completely surprised that the whole day was over and there were no “God fireworks” for anyone but me, just a beautifully quiet spiritual moment for me buried inside the words of one innocent sentence. Hmmm, our God is so mysterious.
During this same week, I’m watching my friends be blessed immensely while in the middle of their ’09 mission trip to Africa, which included a stop in Uganda; the very place the Lord first pulled on my heart through the video Invisible Children. My heart is secretly aching that I was not a part of the trip, longing for fellowship with those dear friends I made last year during that amazing experience, hungry for a BIG HUGE GOD explosion like what happened to me in Africa last year BUT I was settling for vicariously living through them as the best seat in the house at this point was Facebook. With each story they shared and photo they posted I reminisced about how God totally changed me & my life through our trip last year. God even had the loving heart to minister to me through one of the teammates who kindly shared with me some of the children that God had sewn into my heart with threads of steel, REMEMBERED ME too and asked for me by name (and entire YEAR LATER)! Oh how my spirit has loved on Tesfae all year long from a helpless place across the ocean blue. God totally knew how to love on me and it blessed me in such a bittersweet moment to hear those words and it broke my heart to an even deeper degree for the sweet street boys of Ethiopia that have never left their home in my heart.
Aside from Africa, back to MN happenings: I didn’t make to church this particular week the wedding took place, and I went to Monday Night Prayer hoping to see my friend KC again since I had an eerie feeling she might be needing some prayer….a week had passed since her monumental (in her eyes, scary) news and I just had a sense but she did not come to prayer night. Well, Tuesday July 1st arrives and I receive an email from KC around 3pm saying “She’s showing severe physical signs of miscarriage and she’s an absolute emotional wreck and she needs prayers.” INSTANTLY the Holy Spirit revved my engines to drop everything and GO TO HER like I was a mama hen protecting a baby chick inside KC’s 'oven'! I KNEW the promises God had made and THIS was NOT IT! So all of us from my women’s group gathered at KC’s home within the hour and we had the most beautiful ministry unfold before our eyes, surrounded by God’s holy nature. We prayed and prayed and grew together in a way that only God could have planned. We fought for this baby and we stood on our promise in Psalm 128 and God’s words of a new covenant with KC. 3 1/2 INTENSELY LONG hours we prayed our hearts out and God supernaturally intertwined our spirits together to be one heart of a mother, one cry of a hurting child, 5 people sharing in pain, sitting together in the mess of the world's cruel circumstances, growing and pressing IN to Him, taking our eyes off the storm in unity and we gathered our faith as an offering to Jesus and we received a double portion in return! IT WAS PHENOMENAL! We met that evening with hurt overwhelming our hearts and we left with peace and laughter flowing from our hearts through our lips as we hugged goodbye with courage and hope in our spirits. It was the most amazing night I have had since I was in Africa last year. It was one of those times where you simultaneously know in spirit when you are experiencing every minute that “this moment will change the course of my life”.
I drove home, worshipping my amazing God and he showed me His heart; “THIS DAY IS WHY: he needed me here, he needed me home” And I could finally see, he used my deep love for my friend and her impeccable planning for wedding dates to keep me home, where I was penciled in on God's calendar to be all along. And I was fulfilled, happy, blessed, honored, ruined, loved, peaceful, grateful, overflowing, joyful and wrecked that THIS MOMENT, shepherding this MOMENT of monumental growth in 5 people’s lives was on HIS CALENDAR for me, not on mine, but truly on HIS ~ all the way back in April & May when I had to say NO to all these splendid opportunities that shouted “God’s DIVINE appointment” and romanced Maria’s heart… he had this moment already on his calendar and he had selected ME, little ole me to be a part of this history changing day, for if I had obliged in any of those invitations I would have missed this moment, I would have been gone out of state and unable to fulfill these destined shoes. I cried big tears of thanksgiving to my God…that his calendar superseded my desires to exceedingly and abundantly surpass my desires and blew my calendar to smithereens!
My ladies and I left parted ways that night from the 3-season porch, after worshipping & praying together for HOURS on end with the knowledge that we had to fight for this baby in prayer for 1 ½ weeks until KC’s doctor appointment. As the next 1 ½ weeks unfolded God radically changed 5 lives that previously met on Sunday’s to commune in his house for an hour of service and 2 nights a month for a bible study group into being 5 inseparable, praying warriors, life-sustaining valves of one heart beating in unison, in nearly constant contact 24 hours a day, soaking in prayer, seeking the face of a relentless God who had destined this day from the beginning! 5 people spiritually grow more in this 1 week than they have in their entire lives and God creates a new standard of living in their hearts, with new eyes to see, new ears to hear and a deeper love for living in Him. Absolute beauty emerging from these ashes, indescribable with human words, but you know if you’ve been there, you know the beauty I’m describing and its breath-taking, especially from the inside looking out. Through the course of this 1 ½ weeks God becomes the glue that solidifies these lives to one another and he makes even more promises that blow our tiny minds. Just this past Saturday God sent a word for KC, through 2 friends of mine, to get to me so I may deliver it to her, which I delivered to her in 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon/Jesus-style! God’s word was that “the womb is healed and it is finished”….the power of receiving that promise nearly destroyed all of us, SHOCK is the only word that summarizes our facial expressions, it was too sweet to hear and too astonishing to dare believe for KC, the lengths that he went to, to reach her alone were enough to wreck our tiny minds not to mention the power in that promise! The answer to all those prayers that fell upon our Father’s ear.
Her physical body continued to show signs of miscarriage and so although we were on a mountain high on Sunday, rejoicing in this promise of God, when we communed together on Monday for Monday Night Prayer, we had to keep strong in spirit that the supernatural would overcome the natural and we knew we needed more soaking in the only place peace was offered = our Father’s arms. We worshipped God together on Monday and bathed in more prayer. We continued via email & texting to be in constant contact the rest of the week, waiting for our glorious moment on Thursday to arrive = the Doctor Appointment. A day of reckoning for KC & her husband….an appointment they had met so many times before to receive the most devastating news of loss in their lives. An appointment notorious for releasing heartache too deep to comprehend. An appointment that held them trapped in fear. The appointment came, we waited holding our breath as our dear KC faced many of her past demons head on when she walked into that room and we all came to know scientific confirmation of GOD’S MIRACLE = a living baby in her womb!! A healthy heartbeat, a fulfillment of His promises, a new convenant and a new beginning with the promise of new life in every context imaginable.
How great is our God….HOW BIG IS OUR GOD….how beautiful is our GOD! I was made to worship this God of ours, this God of miracles…this Father who longs to embrace each of us with such intimacy. Jesus who lives in constant jealousy for each of our hearts like no other. This God who has embraced KC like no one else could. Our healer. This God who longs to do the same for you & I. This God who I have a sacred obsession for…this is the God I was born to worship!! The Lord of my heart. This is MY GOD!
