While I was out...

So I missed yesterday, but I'm back again today! On Friday, I got a call to do some construction type work for a guy who lives just north of Redding up on a mountain. So I went up there and worked for a few hours after taking in the breathtaking views and then rushed home to take a shower before driving down to Sacramento to hear Todd Bentley. God is so good!

It was well worth the trip. Although we missed almost all of worship due to me getting off of work after we had planned on leaving, the meeting was still great! I have never seen Todd Bentley so drunk in my life! Drunk in the Holy Spirit for those who are wondering what kind of conference I was at. So we had a blast laughing and after the meeting we went out to Denny's with a bunch of friends.

After just 4 hours of sleep I got up the next morning to have my time with God. It was so good. It has been so good since school got out and I got myself to plan on spending time with God rather than just hoping that it fits into my day. Speaking of which, had I not planned it into my morning yesterday I would have never gotten a chance as we were busy the rest of the day.

One of Todd's associates, Jerame (not Jeremy) Nelson, spoke about dreams in the morning session. It was incrredible. I felt like I no longer had any need to worry about not remembering my dreams as the Lord will seal them in your Spirit and sometimes never intends for you to remember them. While waiting to leave after the meeting I prayed for a woman in a wheelchair who uses it because it is hard for her to walk. After prayer she started walking around and didn't feel the pain in her leg!

After grabbing some lunch we headed to the mall to go pray for people to be healed. Again I learned some valueable outreach lessons of how to deal with ministering with people. God still moved, but at times there were awkward situations that came up when neither person knew what the other was thinking or going to say. As we were leaving, the Lord was just touching me when one of the other Bethel students called me to find out where we were. Well, she answered the phone praying in tongues which did not help when I was already jerking around a bit. :)

We showed up to the meeting early to get seats and I saw the women that Jeremy and I had met when we came to see Todd in February after we just flew in to San Francisco from Atlanta. One of them was on crutches and started to walk without them after prayer. I believe she may have had a little pain left over, but by that point I noticed the woman in the wheelchair that I had prayed for that morning. She was sitting in a regular chair with the wheelchair empty next to her! She said that she walked in pushing the wheelchair up the hill! Praise God!

I went back and started to pray for the women and we all started to laugh and get rocked a little bit more. After a few minutes I went to talk with another woman in a wheelchair and her husband. They were an amazing couple and I prayed for all sorts of things for them. He has had cataracts since birth and then God gave me a word about his hearing so I prayed for his ears as well. She has been paralyzed for 37 years and was getting rocked when I prayed for her. The words of knowledge kept coming as God showed me that she had pain in her neck (which she had broken as well) and in her shoulders, as well as deafness in her ears.

Then I went to go back to my seat when several people asked me about my shirt, which was made by one of our interns in first year. I ended up going over to pray for them and we all started to get drunk. Several of us. Then more people came over and the drunkenness increased! Yay God! Some people were just staring at us, but oh well, I had fun!

Then came along a man and a woman. The man had Parkinson's and the woman had MS. As I was praying for the man he stopped shaking and only had a faint tremble. I asked him if he had hearing loss and he did, so I prayed and he responded that he was hearing things that he couldn't hear before. Praise God! At this point the meeting was starting so I prayed quickly for the woman with MS after sharing with her the testimony of a woman getting healed of MS and ME at Bethel a few weeks ago. Praise you Lord!

Worship was fantastic. After having been drunk in the Holy Spirit and having prayed for so many people I was just ready to enter in. It was so nice having Brian and Jenn Johnson and a band from Bethel leading worship. It also helped that I knew all the songs! I honestly can't remember much about what Todd talked about because God was really birthing something in my spirit. I do recall him talking about building your spirit man by praying in the spirit, soaking, and reading the bible. Not that it is some formula, but we can't expect to get closer to God and the Holy Spirit if we don't spend any time with them.

Then it was impartation time as Todd was going to pray for everyone. I was glad that he explained how we should prepare ourselves just to remind me that I should stir myself up (which I already had been doing) and that regardless of what we feel, we should receive by faith. Just because we don't feel a jolt of power doesn't mean that God didn't deposit something in us. I know that God gave me something even though I didn't feel like something major happened. So we got back on the road to head back to Redding.

We were still drunk all the way home, don't worry, we weren't so drunk that it was unsafe to drive, and got back at 1:45 am at which time the neighbors came out and introduced themsleves and we talked for about 5 minutes. Boy was that random. God is gonna get them! After two hours of sleep I was back at it and going for more in the prayer chapel. There really has been an increase as I have pursued God, received impartation, and then given it away. By doing these every day I have been growing a ton in a short period of time.

Just after I got to the prayer chapel one of the security guards came in. He was a student and so I prayed to give him what I had just received. he got rocked pretty good, as did I, and then he told me that he felt someone touch his left shoulder as I touched his right. That had never happened to him before!

I was good and drunk at church before we even started. Thank you Jesus! I fell into my seat at one point just as it was getting started. Worship was fantastic again. It felt like something broke as I went forward and began to dance. Some of the pastors were right behind me and I felt that they broke through what I had been poking at. Anyway, it went from feeling dead, to very alive in a matter of moments. A song or two in I had to prop myself up using the handrail for the stairs going up to the stage. It didn't help for long as I fell down onto the stairs laughing.

At one point I stood up only to fall back down within 10 seconds. I then remained on the ground for the rest of worship. God is so good! Danny Silk continued his message on the role of women in the church. It was great, you should definitely listen to the podcast. During ministry time I approached a man who came forward needing healing from cancer. Come on God! Cancer is one of things I pray into every morning that every person who comes onto the property would be healed. He felt some heat and I released the joy of the Lord onto him, although I think God got me better than He got him. Haha. I fell to the floor and the guy I was praying for kept standing. Oh Jesus, I can't wait for tonight!!!!!

You may want to write this down...

God is good.

Oh wow, what a day I had yesterday. I woke up at 4 am to take a classmate to the Greyhound Bus terminal and after I dropped her off I thought it would be fun to go to the prayer chapel. Good choice. As I prayed I was more aware of His presence and also angels than I have been in a while. After that I had some good soaking time and then went home. I read my bible and made some breakfast. Lol, the only thing I "made" was the bagel that I cut in half to put in the toaster.

Later, when I was reading "The Reality of the Supernatural World" by Todd Bentley, I was hit with some pretty good revelation about the need to maintain spiritual disciplines. I don't want anyone to start debating with me, so I won't touch any specifics, but it was easy to relate what he wrote to my own personal experiences of having trouble doing something when we haven't been doing it regularly. For instance he gave the example of having a hard time getting back into doing meetings after having a week or even just a few days off. However, if he has been doing meetings every day then it is no problem for him to get going the next day. Likewise, revelation from reading the bible comes best when we actively read it every day. If I make a habit of ministering to people in public it becomes easier to do, but if I don't do it for a while, it is very difficult.

Something really seems to be happening in the spirit for me. Maybe it is because I am spending more time in prayer (it isn't because of performance, but rather familiarity!) and in God's presence. Last night at pre-service prayer I was really getting touched and started to laugh a lot, which I haven't done in a while. I went on outreach and was on a team with two of my favorite people. These people would blow you away. We had a blast and ministered to a lot of people. It all started with one of them following arrows they saw in the spirit and then passing it off to the other who felt that we should go to IHOP (Pancakes, not Prayer). So I pull in and before we even get inside the building we immediately found people that matched several words of knowledge. One man's knee got healed and another one's vision improved.

While talking with our waitress and telling her how great she is, I start to think that we should bless her with a large tip and immediately after I think that my friend gives a word of knowledge that we were supposed to bless a Native American and she happened to be one (I wouldn't have guessed it and we actually ran into more Native Americans before we left that did look like it). So we end up leaving her a large tip and after ministering to many other people we headed back.

We didn't make it far before I noticed a man walking on crutches, so we did a U-turn and pulled over to talk to him. We prayed for him and my friends both prophecied over him. While we were praying I could feel heat transfering from my fingers to his knee. He was really touched. It was awesome. So we went to a street that our group leader had written down that has nothing on it except for one intersection. Well, there was a car stopped at that intersection. Turns out one of the girls was teaching the other to drive. We were able to pray for them and just let them know that God thinks they are awesome. After that we finally went back to the church.

OK, so that was kinda long, I will save you by making a new post for what happened Saturday morning at the Healing Rooms...

To Be Continued...

Dream Language

God is so good! Today has been a wonderful day of using my free time to get things done and also spend lots of time with God. I came to the realization this morning that as long as I am at home and my roommate isn't, I have no excuse to not pray in the Holy Spirit and soak to the extent of my heart's desire. Some days I just don't feel like going to the prayer chapel since it can often be crowded and I realized that I need to learn how to pray in tongues and soak elsewhere!

God has been giving me a lot of dreams recently. They have varied greatly but have all spoke to me in some way. Many times I am having two or three dreams each night. Today in addition to two during the night, I went into a dream while I was soaking this afternoon. (There was a slight pause in my blogging train of thought as I could not type in anything in my browser for the past 20 minutes or so. Now back to your regularly scheduled blog.) I have been reading a book by Todd Bentley called "The Reality of the Supernatural World." It seems like it has been a key of sorts to open up new experiences for me, which have manifested most frequently as dreams. Addtionally, my friend Jeremy has been speaking very highly of James Goll's "Dream Language." I read the forward of it recently before going to bed and sure enough I had several dreams that night.

Ironically, the dream I had this afternoon had James Goll in it, even though he didn't look like any of the pictures I have seen of him. However, he looked fairly close to the real thing and I knew in the dream that it was him. In it there was something to do with his book "The Seer" which I own, but have not started reading yet (I think I will read it next after dreaming about it!). Interestingly enough one of the pictures that I saw on the book in the dream is not the actual picture that is on the book. However, in the dream the picture revealed the secret to a mystery that opened a huge door and led to a dramatic encounter with God! I believe that this is the first time that I have ever had a dream about having an encounter with God. I have had dreams about cripples and paralytics getting healed, but never about getting blasted by the Holy Spirit.

I feel kind of funny saying it, but I feel like I need to hire a dream interpreter. Perhaps I should just start to meditate on my dreams so that I can get the interpretation myself. That sounds like a better idea. However, the idea of seeking help isn't totally wrong either. Jeremy pointed out to me the other day how dreams are just as valuable as a prophetic word and understanding what God is saying is just important in a dream as it is through prophecy.