In the presence of the saints
Tonight I went to a potluck for my friend E. who is leaving New York to go back to Indiana after working a summer job here. She started coming to my church in April, and she was pretty endearing right away. Everyone fell in love with her. The word "radiant" was used to describe her multiple times this evening, as we were all saying our goodbyes.
Although saying goodbye was hard, tonight was amazing. The night was hosted at the home of my friends S. & A., a young married couple. Last week in church, S. had a prophetic word concerning a bell. The image was of a very old heavy bell, perhaps the kind in a church tower, and this bell was covered in dust, but on one section, the dust had been wiped away. The word was that the rest of this bell was soon going to be dusted off, and the bell would be put to use again. S. strongly got that the interpretation of the prophecy was that it was symbolic of someone who had moved in a spiritual gift, particularly prophecy, and at some point, for whatever reason, had stopped operating in this gift, and that God was saying it was time to start again. Well, sitting there, I knew without a doubt that it was about me.
About two years ago, I started getting prophecies from God both for individuals and for the church as a whole. Then somewhere along the way, something must have happened, and I shut down on that. I am not even sure when it happened, but it dried up and went away. It went so far that I was even scared to pray for people directly, meaning laying my hands on them and praying out loud. I could pray for someone quietly and on my own, but I started to be afraid that I'd have nothing to say when I started to pray for them aloud; that God would not speak to them through me. I stopped praying for people in mid-week Kinships or at Sunday services altogether.
When S. gave the bell prophecy, I thought I should go to him, claim it, and ask him to pray for me. Then I saw my friend B., and I knew I wasn't afraid to pray for her, because we're close, and I'm at ease and less worried about screwing up, so I said to myself "OK, time to start dusting off the rest of the bell" and went over and prayed for her. Lo and behold, God showed me things on her behalf, gave me words to say, and told me what I needed to pray about, and how to share what He was showing me with her.
So tonight, we were all praying for E. as a group, before sending her off, and I was sitting on the couch and was softly praying in the spirit for a while (i.e. praying in tongues) and then I was just quiet for a while, and suddenly I saw a vision in my mind, and tears rolled down my eyes, but I wasn't sad. I remembered other times when prophecies came to me in the past, I would cry, and to me it was almost as if God is so big, and so impossible to contain, that even when you get a little bit of Him flowing through you, that it's too much for a human being to hold, and all you can do is cry, because there is an overwhelming sense of awe that comes with His presence. I stood up, and walked over to E. and told her what I saw. It rang true to her situation and who she is.
Then later, it happened again, I saw something clearly for my friend B. and shared it with her. She started to cry then laugh as I told her. When she recovered, she explained to all of us that this tied in to an image she has been seeing in her mind for a long time, and with a movie she saw last night that spoke to her about some situations currently in her life. She said how spooky this place was (meaning our church) but I thought to myself, no that's not us, that's just God. He tends to do stuff like that, but it never ceases to amaze me. I mean, he gives me clear cut visual, and verbal prophecy for someone, and it's dead on to their life in ways I could have never known before hand! So, the high point of my night was operating in the spiritual gifts that God had once bestowed upon me, that I somehow lost touch with over time. The bell is finally sounding again.
Our culture is fascinated with the spiritual -- people flock to psychics and those who claim to be able to contact the dead, but they're missing the whole point. That's all counterfeit. It's a pale shadow of what God does. That is the insidiousness of all of the spiritual realm that occurs apart from God The Father, Jesus The Son, and The Holy Spirit -- it's an imitation that passes for the real. Some women in my knitting group were discussing J.'s trip to a psychic. J. admitted that a lot of the stuff that the psychic said was general, and based on fishing for information, but that some of it was stuff he never could have known about her beforehand or otherwise. What struck me as so boneheaded about it was not that she believed that he had told her something valid, but that she didn't even bother to question how someone could have that "gift," or where the ability to know secret information about her comes from. In the case of a psychic, that gift does not come from God. Oh, it's true that perhaps this person would have the gift of prophecy or of discernment if they were a follower of Christ, but in the absence of a relationship with God, that sort of propensity or "talent" is easily manipulated and counterfeited by satan. Oh yes, I'm sure I won't win any fans on this one -- so few people believe in satan anymore, much less know how he operates. The mention of satan being behind anything at all is for religious wackos, Bible-Thumpers, fundamentalist bigots, etc. I'm none of the above, but I know that satan exists just as much as I know that God exists.
I also know that people are hungry for spiritual experience. The new age movement shows that people are so hungry for spirituality that they think it can be bought with large sums of money. The growth of Wicca, and other forms of neo-paganism are on the rise because church has become irrelevant, and so much of organized religion is filled with hypocrisy and worse. Not to even mention the growth of people practicing the more spiritual of the yoga disciplines, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah trend. Islam is also growing around the world, despite their semi-bad rep. The Catholic church is riddled with corruption and sexual abuse scandal. The mainline protestant denominations and much of evangelical Christianity has become so culturally irrelevant that people have left in mass exoduses. I agree that "The Church" is in crisis. However, God is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow. He is my only hope. Not Christianity, not "The Church".
However, I am blessed to be part of a great church. There are no false pieties among us. We are as real as real gets. I'm one of the few lucky ones that is doing church, not playing church. But far too often, this is not the case. I spent my entire life as a Christian, and it's only been in the last three years that I have found a place that is real. People who are not holier than thou, legalistic, squeaky clean. People sometimes curse, and no one drops dead over it. At the yearly church BBQ, you'll find beer in our coolers. I wear black a lot, have a nose ring, and sometimes dye strips of manic panic colors into my hair -- my pastor was the biggest fan of all the hair color changes.
However, the outward stuff is the least of it. Yes, I grew up a punk, new wave and goth chick, but that's hardly the most incendiary identity in my arsenal. Though I'm going to oversimplify here, the eighties were the time I formed my musical identities, and the nineties were when I formed my sexual identities, as identity politics was in full swing on college campuses and in other sectors of society. The lesbian sex wars happened. The schism between radical feminists like Dworkin, and lesbian feminists like the crew of the lesbian sex magazine "On Our Backs" run by Susie Bright and her ilk was in progress, and the debates were often very heated. Even further afield was Pat Califia and the s/m dykes of the "Coming to Power" anthology. I read the radical feminist diatribe "Against Sadomasochism" at the same time I was totally fascinated by my reading of "Coming to Power". I'm politically moderate, but left-leaning. I come from a radical left background of student activism. I was the chair of our campus Center for Womyn's Concerns. Yes, we did spell women with a y. We spent a lot of time talking about how to convince more women to join, and to banish the notions that we were all a bunch of dykes. We'd hold these meetings and they consisted of three lesbian couples, including me and my then partner, L. The funny thing is, we were a bunch of dykes. I remember chastising one of the couples when they didn't show up for an important meeting, or forgot to Xerox the latest flyers; I turned to one of them and barked: "Well, if you could get your face out of her cunt once in a while, maybe we could get some work done!" Oh yes, I took my activism damn seriously!
I'm bisexual, though currently abstinent on all fronts for faith reasons (I won't lie, sometimes that really sucks). I have a background where I was very involved in the leather communities, i.e. S/m, D/s, and all the other letters. On the spiritual front I used to be what is now regretfully dubbed "Christo-pagan" (the term makes me cringe). I had a lot of pagan friends. I was the only Christian who hung out in the coven made up of my friends. My one friend Pooh came up with a title for me, he called me "a pagan for Jesus". The contradiction in terms inherent in that moniker was evident to me then, but I was dualistic. I read tarot cards for people and was eerily accurate. I read rune stones. I played with just about every divinatory system available. I was into astrology. I took Reiki I and II. I went to an all women's full moon circle once. I participated in a few of the covens rituals and holidays. The summer when I first started my relationship with L. I was 21, and I studied "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk more than I read the Bible. Over the years I bought so many books on all kinds of non-Christian spiritual topics that when I decided to discard or burn all my pagan holdings a few years ago I was shocked at how huge my library of metaphysical, and pagan books was. I also had so many tarot decks, plus Celtic book of the dead cards, a few sets of runes, etc. It took a bonfire and lots of garbage bags.
Back to the present day, and my church: My pastor is a woman. I belong to the first Vineyard church to have a female pastor. She has paved the way for others now in our consortium of fellowships. The Vineyard is most a group of churches with similar philosophical beliefs rather than what I'd call a denomination. Nevertheless it is only since finding the Vineyard movement that I have found what it means to have freedom in Christ. The prior 33 years of being a Christian were sheer misery. So much so, that I completely walked away from the church for years at a time. But that is a story for another time. The prodigal years. I learned a lot. Experienced a lot. Got the shit kicked out of me a lot.
I finally reached the end of that though a few years ago. I walked in to the Vineyard, or rather crawled in, because I'd hit total bottom, and I stayed. I'm not sorry. It's a decision I will never regret, no matter how hard it's been or how much of my old life had to die. Just as there are birth pangs, there are death pangs too. The old self tries to hold on for all its worth. It's hard to let go, sometimes your scars are all you think you have, and you mistake your own damage for a personality. So healing can actually feel like dying, but all that is dying is that which is already dead. So I have been learning to let go of all the dead parts of me, even when they try to dig themselves up like the persistent zombies they are. They try to convince me I need them to go on, that they are the best parts of me, the parts that make me who I am, the facets that make me most interesting. Sometimes I almost believe them, until the stench of their putrifying flesh begins invading my nostrils, and then I send them back to the pit where they came from.
Although saying goodbye was hard, tonight was amazing. The night was hosted at the home of my friends S. & A., a young married couple. Last week in church, S. had a prophetic word concerning a bell. The image was of a very old heavy bell, perhaps the kind in a church tower, and this bell was covered in dust, but on one section, the dust had been wiped away. The word was that the rest of this bell was soon going to be dusted off, and the bell would be put to use again. S. strongly got that the interpretation of the prophecy was that it was symbolic of someone who had moved in a spiritual gift, particularly prophecy, and at some point, for whatever reason, had stopped operating in this gift, and that God was saying it was time to start again. Well, sitting there, I knew without a doubt that it was about me.
About two years ago, I started getting prophecies from God both for individuals and for the church as a whole. Then somewhere along the way, something must have happened, and I shut down on that. I am not even sure when it happened, but it dried up and went away. It went so far that I was even scared to pray for people directly, meaning laying my hands on them and praying out loud. I could pray for someone quietly and on my own, but I started to be afraid that I'd have nothing to say when I started to pray for them aloud; that God would not speak to them through me. I stopped praying for people in mid-week Kinships or at Sunday services altogether.
When S. gave the bell prophecy, I thought I should go to him, claim it, and ask him to pray for me. Then I saw my friend B., and I knew I wasn't afraid to pray for her, because we're close, and I'm at ease and less worried about screwing up, so I said to myself "OK, time to start dusting off the rest of the bell" and went over and prayed for her. Lo and behold, God showed me things on her behalf, gave me words to say, and told me what I needed to pray about, and how to share what He was showing me with her.
So tonight, we were all praying for E. as a group, before sending her off, and I was sitting on the couch and was softly praying in the spirit for a while (i.e. praying in tongues) and then I was just quiet for a while, and suddenly I saw a vision in my mind, and tears rolled down my eyes, but I wasn't sad. I remembered other times when prophecies came to me in the past, I would cry, and to me it was almost as if God is so big, and so impossible to contain, that even when you get a little bit of Him flowing through you, that it's too much for a human being to hold, and all you can do is cry, because there is an overwhelming sense of awe that comes with His presence. I stood up, and walked over to E. and told her what I saw. It rang true to her situation and who she is.
Then later, it happened again, I saw something clearly for my friend B. and shared it with her. She started to cry then laugh as I told her. When she recovered, she explained to all of us that this tied in to an image she has been seeing in her mind for a long time, and with a movie she saw last night that spoke to her about some situations currently in her life. She said how spooky this place was (meaning our church) but I thought to myself, no that's not us, that's just God. He tends to do stuff like that, but it never ceases to amaze me. I mean, he gives me clear cut visual, and verbal prophecy for someone, and it's dead on to their life in ways I could have never known before hand! So, the high point of my night was operating in the spiritual gifts that God had once bestowed upon me, that I somehow lost touch with over time. The bell is finally sounding again.
Our culture is fascinated with the spiritual -- people flock to psychics and those who claim to be able to contact the dead, but they're missing the whole point. That's all counterfeit. It's a pale shadow of what God does. That is the insidiousness of all of the spiritual realm that occurs apart from God The Father, Jesus The Son, and The Holy Spirit -- it's an imitation that passes for the real. Some women in my knitting group were discussing J.'s trip to a psychic. J. admitted that a lot of the stuff that the psychic said was general, and based on fishing for information, but that some of it was stuff he never could have known about her beforehand or otherwise. What struck me as so boneheaded about it was not that she believed that he had told her something valid, but that she didn't even bother to question how someone could have that "gift," or where the ability to know secret information about her comes from. In the case of a psychic, that gift does not come from God. Oh, it's true that perhaps this person would have the gift of prophecy or of discernment if they were a follower of Christ, but in the absence of a relationship with God, that sort of propensity or "talent" is easily manipulated and counterfeited by satan. Oh yes, I'm sure I won't win any fans on this one -- so few people believe in satan anymore, much less know how he operates. The mention of satan being behind anything at all is for religious wackos, Bible-Thumpers, fundamentalist bigots, etc. I'm none of the above, but I know that satan exists just as much as I know that God exists.
I also know that people are hungry for spiritual experience. The new age movement shows that people are so hungry for spirituality that they think it can be bought with large sums of money. The growth of Wicca, and other forms of neo-paganism are on the rise because church has become irrelevant, and so much of organized religion is filled with hypocrisy and worse. Not to even mention the growth of people practicing the more spiritual of the yoga disciplines, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah trend. Islam is also growing around the world, despite their semi-bad rep. The Catholic church is riddled with corruption and sexual abuse scandal. The mainline protestant denominations and much of evangelical Christianity has become so culturally irrelevant that people have left in mass exoduses. I agree that "The Church" is in crisis. However, God is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow. He is my only hope. Not Christianity, not "The Church".
However, I am blessed to be part of a great church. There are no false pieties among us. We are as real as real gets. I'm one of the few lucky ones that is doing church, not playing church. But far too often, this is not the case. I spent my entire life as a Christian, and it's only been in the last three years that I have found a place that is real. People who are not holier than thou, legalistic, squeaky clean. People sometimes curse, and no one drops dead over it. At the yearly church BBQ, you'll find beer in our coolers. I wear black a lot, have a nose ring, and sometimes dye strips of manic panic colors into my hair -- my pastor was the biggest fan of all the hair color changes.
However, the outward stuff is the least of it. Yes, I grew up a punk, new wave and goth chick, but that's hardly the most incendiary identity in my arsenal. Though I'm going to oversimplify here, the eighties were the time I formed my musical identities, and the nineties were when I formed my sexual identities, as identity politics was in full swing on college campuses and in other sectors of society. The lesbian sex wars happened. The schism between radical feminists like Dworkin, and lesbian feminists like the crew of the lesbian sex magazine "On Our Backs" run by Susie Bright and her ilk was in progress, and the debates were often very heated. Even further afield was Pat Califia and the s/m dykes of the "Coming to Power" anthology. I read the radical feminist diatribe "Against Sadomasochism" at the same time I was totally fascinated by my reading of "Coming to Power". I'm politically moderate, but left-leaning. I come from a radical left background of student activism. I was the chair of our campus Center for Womyn's Concerns. Yes, we did spell women with a y. We spent a lot of time talking about how to convince more women to join, and to banish the notions that we were all a bunch of dykes. We'd hold these meetings and they consisted of three lesbian couples, including me and my then partner, L. The funny thing is, we were a bunch of dykes. I remember chastising one of the couples when they didn't show up for an important meeting, or forgot to Xerox the latest flyers; I turned to one of them and barked: "Well, if you could get your face out of her cunt once in a while, maybe we could get some work done!" Oh yes, I took my activism damn seriously!
I'm bisexual, though currently abstinent on all fronts for faith reasons (I won't lie, sometimes that really sucks). I have a background where I was very involved in the leather communities, i.e. S/m, D/s, and all the other letters. On the spiritual front I used to be what is now regretfully dubbed "Christo-pagan" (the term makes me cringe). I had a lot of pagan friends. I was the only Christian who hung out in the coven made up of my friends. My one friend Pooh came up with a title for me, he called me "a pagan for Jesus". The contradiction in terms inherent in that moniker was evident to me then, but I was dualistic. I read tarot cards for people and was eerily accurate. I read rune stones. I played with just about every divinatory system available. I was into astrology. I took Reiki I and II. I went to an all women's full moon circle once. I participated in a few of the covens rituals and holidays. The summer when I first started my relationship with L. I was 21, and I studied "The Spiral Dance" by Starhawk more than I read the Bible. Over the years I bought so many books on all kinds of non-Christian spiritual topics that when I decided to discard or burn all my pagan holdings a few years ago I was shocked at how huge my library of metaphysical, and pagan books was. I also had so many tarot decks, plus Celtic book of the dead cards, a few sets of runes, etc. It took a bonfire and lots of garbage bags.
Back to the present day, and my church: My pastor is a woman. I belong to the first Vineyard church to have a female pastor. She has paved the way for others now in our consortium of fellowships. The Vineyard is most a group of churches with similar philosophical beliefs rather than what I'd call a denomination. Nevertheless it is only since finding the Vineyard movement that I have found what it means to have freedom in Christ. The prior 33 years of being a Christian were sheer misery. So much so, that I completely walked away from the church for years at a time. But that is a story for another time. The prodigal years. I learned a lot. Experienced a lot. Got the shit kicked out of me a lot.
I finally reached the end of that though a few years ago. I walked in to the Vineyard, or rather crawled in, because I'd hit total bottom, and I stayed. I'm not sorry. It's a decision I will never regret, no matter how hard it's been or how much of my old life had to die. Just as there are birth pangs, there are death pangs too. The old self tries to hold on for all its worth. It's hard to let go, sometimes your scars are all you think you have, and you mistake your own damage for a personality. So healing can actually feel like dying, but all that is dying is that which is already dead. So I have been learning to let go of all the dead parts of me, even when they try to dig themselves up like the persistent zombies they are. They try to convince me I need them to go on, that they are the best parts of me, the parts that make me who I am, the facets that make me most interesting. Sometimes I almost believe them, until the stench of their putrifying flesh begins invading my nostrils, and then I send them back to the pit where they came from.
posted by scribe at 8/17/2005
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