Embrace The Blessing

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A decade ago I lived in Pennsylvania and attended a conference in Harrisburg, PA where John and Carol Arnott were speaking. John shared about a horse they were given as a gift. The horse was somewhere in the USA and they lived in Toronto Canada–a great distance away. Eventually the horse got sick and died, and what the Lord showed them was that because they did not embrace the blessing, the enemy was able to come in and kill the horse.

What struck me about this wasn’t so much that the enemy came in and stole–because stealing is an expected action for the enemy. What struck me was that embracing the blessing wasn’t based on embracing something that was convenient, but rather embracing the gift someone was giving whether it was a gift they wanted to receive or not.

A few years ago I had occasion to put this into practice. My father in law had been living with us for a while and was deeply enthralled with Jimmy Swaggart–to the point that anyone who believed in Jesus but didn’t belive in the message of the cross according to Jimmy Swaggart wasn’t really saved at all. It was a frustrating time to be sure, as he got upset when no one wanted to talk about God with him and we simply didn’t want to be insulted every time he discussed God-related things.

One day he gave me a Jimmy Swaggart study bible. I, knowing that under no circumstances ever was I going to read or use this book, politely declined it–multiple times. He was very hurt by this, clearly not understanding why I didn’t want it and convinced that if I gave it a chance that this book would deeply and profoundly transform my life. I was frustrated and didn’t understand how in the many conversations we had up to that point he didn’t understand that I was not interested.

As I thought about it later that day, I remembered the message John Arnott had given–and realized this was an opportunity to embrace the blessing. While I might not prefer the actual item itself, I realized it was irrelevant. The essence behind the gift was a spiritual inheritance from my father in law, and he was attempting to pass down a blessing to someone who had married into his family. I apologized and asked if he would still be willing to gift me the Bible, to which he delightedly jumped up and gave it to me, grinning from ear to ear.

Yet another time I was walking home from work and met a homeless man whom I felt drawn to. I offered him some food I had on hand, to which he replied he wasn’t hungry. As we talked, he offered me some water. While I didn’t really want the water from his canteen, I accepted and he poured me a cup. As I drank the water, I brought out some food and offered to share it with him–and because I had accepted his gift he felt free to accept mine as well. I didn’t realize it until it happened, but was important to him that he wasn’t accepting a handout, so when I received his cup of water it made it acceptable for him to receive something from me as well. Moreover, my wife and I delivered additional food and a blanket to him later that night which he also graciously received–and even mentioned that he had hoped I would return.

There are times in our lives where we refuse a gift and it is right to do so, but there are other times when to refuse the gift is more problematic than it is to receive it–as was seen both with my father in law and the man I met on the street. If we can learn to embrace the blessings behind undesired gifts I believe we will not only reap unexpected rewards, but what we sow we will also reap–and the same grace that we extend to others will be extended to us as well. I believe that when we extend love to the giver and accept these undesirable gifts, we put ourselves in a position to receive more of God’s blessings in our own lives. I pray this message of embracing the blessing will both touch and remain with you as it has with me these many years.

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Re-Engaging The Beloved

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Yesterday was Valentines Day–and on that day I spoke with a friend about a number of things, but one of them was about how it is hard to be single on this day. While I have been married for ten years, I am not a stranger to this struggle. Thirteen years ago I had a fairly devastating breakup with my high-school girlfriend. We had dated for two years straight and I was happing looking toward marrying her, when out of the blue she broke it off. While I am glad today that she did, it was difficult at the time, especially trying to figure out what direction to take with my life without her in it. The short version is that I decided to pursue God above all else, including not to date, expecting that if I sought Him, he would bring the wife along. Matthew 6:33 says, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” I took this at face value, deciding that I would not pray for her, look for her, or date. Three years later after doing just that, I had an unexpected six hour conversation with a friend, at the end of which I proposed to her, and within fourteen hours of beginning that conversation we were married. Fast forward ten years and I have been happily married to my very best friend whom I didn’t search for.

This isn’t the method for everyone, but it is for some of you. However, this word is for everyone—that as we continue to pursue Him, we will receive all else. I shared this word with my friend last night, telling him that God is wooing him, and how He wants to spend time with His love on this special day. I felt the Spirit nudging me even as I was giving this word to my friend, that God wants to draw nearer to me–and likewise wants me to do the same. James 4:8a says, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” God is calling each of us to a higher level, to a deeper relationship, so He and we might know one another better.

My friend shared how he used to spend time praying and just enjoying being with God, and that after some funky church-related things happened, he lost that spark–not because God was any different, but because he was, and because life was. We talked about how we have both been in that place–deeply and frequently engaging in that God-relationship, to the point that we have each had our own encounter where Jesus appeared to us. While neither of us actually physically saw Him, Jesus revealed to us at those times that it was Him. And those are the kinds of encounters we both long to experience again.

People sometimes talk about the “gift” of being single. To those who are unmarried it usually doesn’t feel much like a gift, and the married ones are usually the one saying it. I found in my own time as a bachelor that yearning for that “someone” can be just as distracting as having that someone present, and whether married or single the possibility always exists that life can pull us away from the depths of relationship with God. This Valentines Day I have sensed and responded to the call to re-engage God. It’s not that I ever stop, on the one hand. He is in me and I in Him, and I talk to Him often enough. But there is a depth that I sense missing–a level to which I sense His Spirit calling me, saying:

My beloved responded and said to me,
‘Arise, my darling, my beautiful one,
And come along.
‘For behold, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
‘The flowers have already appeared in the land;
The time has arrived for pruning the vines,
And the voice of the turtledove has been heard in our land.
‘The fig tree has ripened its figs,
And the vines in blossom have given forth their fragrance.
Arise, my darling, my beautiful one,
And come along!’” (Song of Solomon 2:10-13)

I encourage you that wherever you are, whatever level of relationship with God, seek Him and everything else will follow. Let Him touch those places of worry and fear, and silence the nagging doubts that spending time with Him simply isn’t enough. Yes, there are things to do, places to go, and people to see, and we will certainly do those things. But is life really richer without love? Is life really better-lived without the conscious presence of His love filling us? How can we expect to transform a world, much less our own families, if we won’t take time to come away and sit awhile with the One Who Is Above All Things, the lover of our souls? Romans 8:32 says, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” Take time to engage that relationship. Purpose in your heart to know Him above all else, for even as I have said, if we seek the Kingdom, God has promised that He will give us everything else. Happy Valentines Day, and may God richly bless and touch your life in a new way.

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. . . But I Might Miss Something

Back when I met my wife, she had a friend named Deana (not her real name). Deana was never on time to anything–to the point they had dubbed this “Deana Time.” In addition to showing up for planned events hours late, in what can only be compared to African time, she would never commit to anything.

Anything.

Ever.

She really wouldn’t either. I remember one conversation I had with her where she was talking about not having enough money for things. I asked her why she wasn’t using her skills as a dental hygienist and her answer was, “Well, I might miss something.” “Miss what?” “I don’t know–but I might miss something.” This conversation continued for a while as I tried to help give her some insight on her situation. I discovered after a while that her problem wasn’t that she didn’t have money, or that she might miss something. Her problem was fear.

Deana was afraid she would miss out on something, but what she didn’t realize was that she already WAS missing out on things. Because she didn’t have a steady job, she didn’t have the financial security it would provide, and as a senior citizen, she struggled with income even though she was physically capable of working. Lacking the financial backing, anything that cost money outside of her meager budget was out of reach, and the stress and worry she had over her finances added to the problem. In short, she was already missing things–peace of mind for starters, but also other events and activities she would have enjoyed had she gone with the wisdom-option and gotten a job. Yet, the fear of “missing something” continued to hold her back.

I don’t know where Deana is now, ten years later, and I hope that she is in a better position than she was then, but as old habits die hard, I find it sadly unlikely. This is just one example of many as to why emotional healing is so important. When we don’t deal with our inner hurts and fears, we allow ourselves to be unknowingly guided by those fears in daily decisions. As we step into a new year, I encourage you to look at the habits and patterns in your life that hold you back, and consider how you can work toward healthier patterns in this coming year.

If you would like some assistance with developing new patterns, the following links may help:

Therapies

Freedom Flowers – flower and gem essences that help resolve negative emotional patterns and create healthy ones

Inner Healing Ministries

Freedom Encounters

Elijah House

Alice Briggs – Emotional and Spiritual Healing

Debalm Ministry

DID Self-Healing: Integrating Fragments and Alters

I have been working with a prayer counselor for over a year now to work on what could be termed soul-healing. While I have discussed in previous articles about what fragments are and why they are important to address, I have not as of yet discussed how to heal them when you don’t have a prayer-partner available to help. The benefit of this for me is that I can accelerate the integration process, using the work I do with my counselor as a base to pursue further prayer work on my own. Thus, I will attempt to explain my own process of fragment self-healing.

When I first learned about and started working in this area, I realized I had already done some self-healing fragment work but didn’t know at the time that I was working with fragments. All I knew was that what I saw in the spirit seemed to be effective so I would do it from time to time with no terminology for it. Since then I have developed a slightly more defined method that works well for me, and hopefully it will work well for you. If not, my hope is that it provides some insight that you can use to develop your own method.

I used to begin by imagining a large space with a platform in the center. On that platform was a pillar of gold or blue light, with a small version of me in the middle. I view this as my “core self”. I would envision lots of people standing outside the pillar–other versions or aspects of myself that needed to be brought into unity and wholeness. I would then mentally intend or will for those fragments to line up and walk up the steps of the platform and into the light. As they would walk into the pillar, they would be sucked inside my image of my core self. One of the things that surprised me when I did this was just how many fragments were milling around outside the light pillar–hundreds, possibly more. Even when I had them line up and integrate, there were usually still many more that wouldn’t get in line and join together.

This was one of the things that showed me I was on to something. Typically, when I daydream and imagine something, I am fully in control of what happens because it is all inside my mind. When I engage spiritual reality, not everything responds according to my will simply because there are other sentient beings involved whose choices I can’t control. In this case, those fragments who chose not to integrate were those who were either not ready or not willing to do so. I would at times try to make them integrate, but that only worked minimally as I could sense them fighting against me.

Fast forward years later, I still use an integration method that is similar, but I have added a few components. First, while I still make use of a “fragment plain”–the open space filled with fragments–I have changed the way I visualize the location. Now I often imagine myself in the throne room of God with the fragments and my core self in front of the Father. Jesus is there and I ask Him and the angels to help me integrate the fragments, which they do. I begin by asking Jesus to separate all the fragments who are ready to integrate at this moment, and to have them come join my core self. Then I ask the angels to minister to all of the fragments who are close to being ready, but who aren’t quite there yet. As I do this, and give it a few minutes, sometimes they will choose to integrate as well. Finally, I ask Jesus to work on the ones who aren’t ready–and most especially to reveal Himself to the fragments that don’t know Him.

The most recent time I did fragment self-healing was while driving to work. For some this may seem dangerous but I have become accustomed to engaging the visionary realm while doing other activities, so it was relatively safe and easy for me. What surprised me was that on this particular occasion as I began to have the fragments integrate, I began to cry. This is significant to me because I have found when working with fragments that crying indicates healing and integration. In the natural our bodies release tears when negative emotional energies are released, and the physical composition of our tears are different from when we have something in our eye. Thus, when I found myself crying it further confirmed to me that this method actually works and isn’t a figment of my imagination.

The main benefit of self-integration is that I don’t have to wait for someone else. Jesus is the Master-healer and if I let Him guide the session it tends to be effective. Previously when I didn’t understand what I was doing I tried to force the fragments to integrate via my will, and while it worked for some, there were others that simply wouldn’t respond and nothing I did could make them. When Jesus loves them into submission, they willingly go where He leads, and as He is the Good Shepherd, they are able to trust Him with their safety and well-being when it comes time to integrate.

The other important thing about being Spirit-led in this process, and letting Jesus run the show, is that He will often do more than I expect. Most recently He took three fragments with Him that He indicated needed special attention–and far more help than I was going to be able to provide them on my own. From what I was able to discern, these particular fragments were under heavy demonic bondage. He assured me that in the right time He would integrate them with me, but that He was going to do a deep work in them and set them free.

If fragment self-healing is something you are interested in or have been seeking, consider trying the method laid out above. If the idea of using the throne room of God doesn’t work for you, try another location. The fragment plain is always a good option, and you can fill it with healing power and glory light in prayer before you assemble your fragments there. The benefit of the light pillar is that it acts as a protective mechanism for your core self–keeping it inside the pillar and having the other fragments come to it is an act of submission and/or subservience, which really just ensures that no other personalities take over during the integration process. While it is not extremely common, it can happen, so the protective screen seems prudent to me.

If you try this out, consider commenting and sharing your experiences below. Share what worked, what didn’t work, and any new things you learn along the way. If you have another method that works well for you, share that as well–because I firmly believe when we share what we know, together we grow. Blessings!

These techniques I used are now available with additional techniques and advice in my new coauthored book Broken to Whole: Inner Healing for the Fragmented Soul . In this book you will learn not only how to identify fragmented parts of your soul and spirit that need healing and integration, but you will uncover why and how they got broken to begin with, as well as what problems they have been causing in your life. I believe that many readers will find a light-bulb goes on in their minds as they read this book. You will begin to uncover contributing spiritual factors behind frustrating life patterns, physical ailments, and more, as well as techniques and solutions on how to fix them. I encourage you to pick up a copy of Broken To Whole today to kick-start and accelerate your healing journey.

For those interested in additional help, you can use the “Fragment Finder” flower essence by Freedom Flowers as an adjunct. alongside the book to help move your emotional healing journey forward even faster.

On Spiritual DNA and Inheritance

I was at work one night recently and for some reason was reminded of the spiritual legacy that I have received from my parents. Unlike most inheritance, which one receives upon the parents’ death, my parents are quite alive–and this is the benefit of spiritual inheritance, which we receive not on death, but at conception.

Our spiritual and soul traits are just as much a part of our DNA as physical traits such as height and eye color. While science is able to visualize two strands of DNA, it is posited by various spiritual groups that we might have up to 22 strands, and a few fringe groups suggest we might have 144 or even upwards of 2 million. While I think the 2-million is probably a bit over the top (I am talking about strands of DNA on a single chromosome, not DNA segments, snippets, codons, etc.) it is becoming increasingly accepted even in some Christian groups that we have more than the two visible strands of physical DNA.

The Bible supports this somewhat, talking about how we have been “born from above” in John 3, and how we have God’s spiritual seed within us. At the very least, if there is an invisible spiritual DNA that closely matches physical DNA then at minimum we have 4 strands total between the physical and spiritual, but I suggest the number is much higher, reaching at least 12 if not more.

At any rate, this spiritual DNA explains some of the “coding” and similarities we may observe between ourselves and our parents. It definitely does in my case. As with physical DNA, while some traits are passed down, others may remain dormant in the family line while others express themselves noticeably. I have seen this in my own family and life, and believe that 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 explains this concept to a certain extent. “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.” While the same Holy Spirit lives in both my parents and myself, and while even that same spiritual DNA exists in both myself and my parents each respectively, Holy Spirit draws different attributes of that DNA to the surface.

My mother is and has always been hungry for things of the Spirit, and would occasionally have visions. She was in the Episcopal denomination where fairly little is understood about spiritual gifts as a whole, and it is even less often talked about, providing little opportunity to learn and grow in that area. She is also a teacher, loves evangelizing children, and is creative, fun, and very excitable.

My father is an Episcopal priest, and he has much compassion for the sick and hurting. While he was originally planning to be a doctor, he instead works with the spiritually ill, having heard an audible voice telling him to go to seminary instead. My father also used to do deliverance ministry when I was younger. He has a lot of wisdom, is good working with his hands, and loves gardening.

As I look at my parents and the rich heritage of desires and things of the spirit that they bring me, I find it little surprise that I can see my own passions as a reflection of their own. I am exceptionally hungry for things of the Spirit–signs, wonders, and miracles. I am a seer as well, but have learned to both see and hear in the spirit, and am able to exercise a more full range of spiritual sense than either of my parents. I have a desire to preach and help teach the body to grow in all things spiritual, which can be seen as a sort of evangelism to the Church to help the Body move in the gifts of the spirit and Holy Spirit’s power. I am a nurse by profession and may one day be a doctor as well, but I greatly enjoy healing the sick by the power of God, and firmly believe God’s healing power extends even to resurrection and immortality. I enjoy gardening, although nowhere to the extent that my wife does, and I like doing hands-on crafty things although not the same kind as my father.

My point in sharing this is that I believe we all have a spiritual inheritance that helps shape who we are and who we are called to be. While sometimes it can diverge sharply from the traits we see expressed in our parents, I believe that if we dig deep enough we will find that in some cases it isn’t that our traits are so different from theirs, but that our parents’ dreams and passions were swallowed up by the cares of this world, and as we find and give those things expression we can in some way help fulfill the destiny they were designed to experience as well. It brings a whole new perspective to the idea of “honoring your father and mother” because as we discover and engage our spiritual inheritance we are igniting not only our destiny, but theirs and those of our ancestors before them. It is no surprise then that as Hebrews 12:1-2a says “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Our spiritual DNA is part of the race-markers for this race, and it is a relay, not a single-person run. The cloud of witnesses include our ancestors who are looking to see what we do with the distillation of destiny that runs through our veins.

God has positioned you uniquely where you are, and to have the gifts and abilities passed down from your parents. Regardless of whether your parents were good to you or not, what unique gifts have you received from them? If you don’t know your birth parents, ask the Lord to show you the legacy He has given you–both from them and from your current family. Spiritual inheritance is spiritual by nature, and adoption is a form of spiritual in-grafting whereby you can partake of the DNA from both your birth parents and your life-parents. I encourage you to continue to seek and pursue the Lord as He reveals new aspects of your calling, gifts, and destiny to you–for as with all relay races, when one finishes, we all finish. May the blessing of the Lord be upon you as you unlock and decode your spiritual DNA.

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A friend was kind enough to point out that there are some books on the subject that may help you walk through this process. One, recently published by some friends, is called Accessing Your Spiritual Inheritance. The back cover text says:

“Alice didn’t fall down a rabbit hole but she did walk through a mystical doorway in a vision to recover blessings her ancestors failed to claim. When Alice came back and shared her experience, Seneca wasted no time going through her own door. Del’s approach differed — she wound up floating along in her bloodstream!   Through telling our stories, others went through their own doors, leading to better relationships with God, increase in finances, favor, and giftings. Although this book touches on generational curses and how to remove them, we focus on claiming the blessings your family line has lost. However, you’ll need to be open to having a vision, and we’ll walk you through the step-by-step process so that you, too, can restore your lost generational blessings. Your hidden inheritance awaits!”

Other Books include:

Repentance: Cleansing Your Generational Bloodline

In Light of His Preeminent Goodness

A few weeks ago, October 26th-29th 2016, Hearts of Fire International led by Dr. Aaron Winter (of which I am a volunteer on staff) hosted the Northwest Prayer Summit–a four day conference focused on transforming the region through prayer. The focus of the meetings was on prayer and thus there was not much in the way of personal ministry through most of the conference. The last night we held a fire tunnel after James Goll spoke on “A Goodness Revolution,” stating that God is changing our view of Him in light of His preeminent goodness.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, a fire tunnel is a fun-sounding name for a prayer line–almost a prayer gauntlet of sorts where a group of people line up facing each other in pairs and everyone else passes between them and receive prayer and laying on of hands as they walk slowly through the tunnel. This particular fire tunnel started sometime after 10pm, and as part of the staff hosting the event, we had over 2 hours of cleanup left once we finished–and with over 500 people present, the fire tunnel was going to take a while. This fire tunnel was incredibly impromptu and unplanned, taking even the staff by surprise, but attitudes were mostly pretty positive in spite of the additional hours of work it would involve (all told we arrived home around 2 am).

About halfway through, with my wife and I the first pair people passed between, an older woman stopped before entering and asked for prayer for healing her right-sided sciatic pain. I stepped out of line with this woman to keep from blocking everyone else and began to pray. After about ten minutes of working with her, praying and rechecking her pain frequently, doing some emotional healing, and asking Holy Spirit each step of the way what the next move was, her pain was completely gone but she still had numbness in her feet. At that time I sensed the Spirit telling me to send her through the line, and moments after someone came to get me to fix another problem elsewhere, pulling me away from the prayer line.

A bit later the woman found me and informed me that the numbness had left as she went through the line, but that wasn’t all. It turns out she had this pain for a few weeks, and had been asking the Lord for healing throughout the entire 4-day conference. As I stated before, we had only been doing minimal personal ministry throughout the event, and to make matters worse I had gotten a word of knowledge in the previous session for sciatic pain–but on the left side. God, in light of His preeminent goodness, decided that this woman wasn’t going to go home from the event without being healed. She received her healing at the end of the last session of the last day during an unplanned prayer tunnel. I was literally in tears when she told me this, and couldn’t help but start crying as I shared this story with others for days after.

I can’t explain why it is that God’s goodness brings me to tears, but there is something about how incredibly kind He is that overwhelms me at times, and healing is a surefire way to get the waterworks flowing. John 3:16 says that “God loved the world so much that he gave his only son that whomever believed in him would not die . . .” Sickness is simply death-in-process, and healing is a manifestation of God’s love–because God doesn’t want us to die. I am so thankful that Aaron heard and obeyed God that night when he called for the fire tunnel because I know it was an answer to this woman’s incessant pleas for help. And how loving was it of God to ensure that His daughter didn’t leave without getting her need met? Astounding.

If there is one thing that will radically transform our worldview, it is when we get a revelation of God’s goodness. The Bible is chock-full of verses that demonstrate God’s kindness, mercy, and love, but many of us have been brought up with a focus on sin, wrath, and judgment. When we start to see how stunningly kind God is, especially through events such as Him healing that woman’s sciatic pain, it shifts how we expect God to act in the future, raises our faith, and alters our experience. I encourage you to take a few moments and reframe a recent life event in light of His preeminent goodness. It changes everything.

The Coming Wave of Healing

For many years, prophets have spoken of a “Third Great Awakening” coming. I can’t agree or disagree having not had revelation on the subject one way or the other. What I have seen in the recent past is the latest Wave of Healing. In the past seven or eight years, street healing has become THE new thing God is doing in regards to healing. By street healing, I mean where believers politely ambush unsuspecting sick or injured people and heal them in Jesus’ name then continue on with their day. This Wave of Healing has raised up many champions who continue to faithfully teach and train an army of street healers who can heal in the community as easily as they can in church. I have recently felt nudged that there is a new healing wave about to crest–the Wave of Inner Healing.

The journey to physical healing can be a long one–full of anguish and very real pain, sometimes fraught with disappointment and even despair. Health is one of the largest industries worldwide and people spend billions upon billions of dollars each year to be in good health. Healing prayer is on the rise, but God is after something deeper–and more effective. What we street healers have discovered is that healing can be prevented–often by demons who block our healing efforts. These demons have come in through a variety of means, but often they can stay because the door that let them in is still open. We can command them out all day long, but if we don’t get to the root of the problem, they will continue to cause physical problems and block the healing. Even if we kick the demon out and heal the injury, it may resurface hours, days, or weeks later as the door is still open and the hidden problem is still there.

Inner healing is the solution to this problem. Many–and I daresay most–physical maladies have an emotional component behind them. Even with physical trauma such as car accidents, there can be an emotional issue that set up the conditions in the spirit realm that made room for the enemy to come in and create the physical trauma event. When the emotional wounds are healed, the physical injury becomes much easier to heal, and the risk of that injury returning significantly lessens. When I pray for physical healing I start with the physical problem, but if that doesn’t get rapid results, I quickly start to ask God for revelation on emotional contributors and deal with them before praying for healing again. When I do this, I find the success rate goes up.

The Lord revealed to me recently that the new Wave of Healing that He is releasing is that of Inner Healing. While this isn’t a “new” wave per se, the last wave wasn’t really “new” either. Waves are rhythmic, undulating, and repetitive. When one wave crests, another is returning beneath it, and another one follows close behind. The reason an inner healing wave will almost always follow a physical healing wave is for the reasons shared above–when physical healing fails, people start to ask questions, and when we ask the right questions, God shows us how emotional healing can play a part. Since the Street Healing Wave seems to be riding high and even cresting, the Inner Healing Wave is following close behind and God is raising up an army of Inner-Healers–usually from the ranks of the Street Healers.

If you have been getting discouraged with failed street healing, there is a reason and God is calling you to something deeper. If you have felt that God is moving you out of street healing and in another direction, don’t be surprised–there is a good chance God is trying to take you to the next level. If you are excited about physical healing and want to learn all you can, then now is as good a time as any to learn how inner healing can transform the physical body. This is not meant to discourage physical healing in any way, as it is still very important and something I do regularly–however, God is taking people a step further, expanding the healing arsenal, and taking us deeper.

If you want to learn more about how emotional healing can help you heal others, or maybe you just want to get healed yourself, check out my blog series titled “Divine Healing That Works”. In this series we will start to connect the dots between physical and emotional healing, and provide some keys that will help you get your healing and get others healed as well. May the Lord bless you in spirit, soul, and body, and may you go ever deeper in His love for you as you tread the path set before you.

Extend Grace

As the administrator and moderator of various social media groups, it is my job to ensure that communication within a group is topic-relevant and generally non-offensive (no swearing or name-calling). From time to time I have to resolve conflicts, and most often this occurs behind the scenes via private message. It can be very frustrating to have these conversations because while I hope people will always operate in maturity, they don’t. Everyone is at different places in their personal growth, so while maturity is preferable, it’s not always present. My biggest job is to extend grace to the offender to help them grow, which is often difficult as their behavior usually stems from misguided heart motives.

In a recent encounter, I spoke with a woman we will call “Amelia” about this very thing. She had a domineering approach in the group so I wrote her privately. We had a manageable discussion at first, and the conversation continued for a few days as I struggled to effectively communicate with her. I sought counsel from my wife and another trusted friend to help me walk the line to both extend grace and set clear boundaries.

The boundaries are pretty simple: this is what is and is not acceptable in the group and these are the rules you need to abide by. Period. This is a black and white line of clearly defined expectations that is easy to understand. To extend grace is a bit more difficult, as it means swimming in the gray area during each conversation. This individual was highly dogmatic in her approach which I have a hard time with, and it also didn’t mesh with the group. As one can guess, this dogma also made communicating a need for change difficult as well, and it was poorly received. My biggest struggle when doing this is that I have to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) but to me that means I extend grace. It means I do my best to promote, uplift, and not quench another’s fervor even when requiring change.

I once heard a pastor preach a message out of 2 Timothy, and a concept he shared has stuck with me since. It comes from 2 Timothy 2:25: “Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth,”. When we give gentle instruction, we extend grace to our opponents and increase the likelihood they will actually hear our message and respond accordingly. How does this work? I believe it starts by assuming the other person has the best heart motive regardless of their actions, and then I speak to that motive.

In this instance, I spoke to Amelia about the wonderful intentions she had and that I recognized those intentions for what they were. It also meant I explained that these intentions, while well-meaning, were not received by the group based on the method used to express her heart. I offered a suggestion as to how that motive might be more clearly received by others–and I repeated this same tactic almost every time I responded. By assuming the best, I pulled on the good Amelia was trying to bring to the group instead of focusing on how it fell short of expectations. The goal was to reinforce the positives, helping Amelia feel her heart was heard even if she had to change her approach.

Unfortunately, in those few days the conversation moved from civil to caustic, complete with threats, and in the end I blocked her both personally and from the group. While the negotiation ultimately failed, I still believe in the process. It would have been really easy to click a few buttons and block her right away, but this doesn’t make room for growth. I believe one of the big struggles in our day is that we can electronically write people off in a few moments.

Working through conflict and taking the difficulty head-on can go by the wayside, especially when moderators aren’t necessarily more mature or emotionally healed than everyone else. I believe this method–to purposefully extend grace–is the way Jesus helped people to grow and I believe it’s something we all can learn to do better. Think of a current situation where you could use this and see if it affects the outcome–you might be surprised at the results, and even if it fails, you have built someone up when you could have torn them down. It’s what Jesus would do. “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he has brought justice through to victory.” (Matthew 12:20).

God, Gays, and the Orlando Shooting

Generally speaking, I don’t like reading about tragedies on social media for days on end, and I rarely have anything to add to the conversation so it is uncharacteristic of me to write a blog post on the subject, but after waking up yesterday afternoon from a dream (I work on night shift and often sleep during the day), the dream stuck with me and something I heard on the news later about the Orlando Shooting nearly made me cry while caring for a patient at work.

What I remember of the dream was fairly simple. I was talking to a young guy–early twenties, college-aged. We were getting on a bus to go somewhere and continued to chat. At some point in the dream I mentioned to him that we needed to get shirts that said something to the effect that God isn’t mad at people because they are gay. In the dream I think I may have had one appear on me while I was telling him. Then I woke up.

The night before last I was awake most of the night working on my newest book, Feathers From Heaven, and I vaguely caught something on my Facebook feed about this shooting, but I didn’t look up any details on it. When I awoke from my dream, I knew that something was up, and my brother-in-law told me about the shooting shortly thereafter. On the drive to work I felt in my spirit that something was wrong–a nondescript feeling I couldn’t describe but utter sadness, to the point that I was crying while driving my truck to work even though I had no words to explain why.

At the hospital, I was working with a patient when I heard on the TV in their room that buses had been taking people away from the danger zone to another safe location. Right then it hit me that I was riding a bus in my dream, with a message that God doesn’t hate people becasue they are gay, and that instead He loves them very much. I realized that many people are going to start running their mouths and spouting off that this is God’s judgment against the gay community.

Let me be extremely clear: God is NOT judging anyone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or any other sexual orientation, and He certainly isn’t commissioning people to commit acts of murder and sheer evil such as the shooting in the Orlando bar. It’s wrong, and it isn’t God’s heart. God loves gays. He doesn’t love people more or less based on who they sleep with or what actions they take. And you know what? Except for the grace of God I’d probably be gay too. Maybe even I’d be in a bar somewhere getting shot at. What makes me different than anyone in that bar? God’s goodness, nothing more and nothing less.

The beautiful thing about what Jesus did on the cross is that God is no longer counting our sins against us. Some people consider being gay a sin. Others don’t. Regardless of where you stand, the Bible is very clear that God isn’t standing in heaven with a lightning bolt waiting to smite people–He doesn’t have any smiting left to give because Jesus willingly took all judgment and wrath upon himself. God has nothing but love and kindness to give, which is really all He had to begin with.

It is very important that in the days ahead we make sure to avoid judgment, anger, hate, and anything along those lines when talking to people in the gay community. You know what? People are afraid. If nothing else, this attack accomplished that. People now have even more of a reason to fear for their lives simply because they are alive and breathing. And you know what else? It’s our job to do something about it. Whether we make shirts or signs and stand at a gay pride parade or even just refrain from posting judgmental comments on social media, let us all make an effort to dispel fear, encourage love, and generally just be decent people without making this mass murder about guns, who we sleep with, or anything other than an opportunity to love some hurting people and pray for them.

What would Jesus do in this situation? Likely, he would operate in power and raise the dead. He would be kind to the brokenhearted. He would lift up the downcast and sit with the grieving. Jesus would be the living embodiment of the kindness and goodness that are the only things that bring healing in this type of situation. He would love, and love deeply. We are given many options of how to respond today. Let us choose to be Jesus to someone.

Fragments – Part 3 of Divine Healing that Works

In the previous installment of this series (here) we discussed how demons can affect us and put us under bondage, what their legal authority actually is, and changes we can make in our lives to prevent their influence.

Soul fragments are another aspect of this emotional-wound issue. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, these fragments are the things that give people multiple personalities and are literally the result of our soul breaking into pieces. To explain further, think of the soul as a gemstone. It is moderately strong, but life stressors act like a hammer, and when a hammer hits in just the right places over time this soul “gem” can crack and eventually cause pieces to chip off. As a whole, soul fragmentation is not good, but it occurs as a protective mechanism. The majority of fragments form in younger years when children don’t have the coping mechanisms that adults do, and traumatic difficult life experiences children cannot cope with get transferred to a small portion of the soul that then fractures off to become a fragment. As a result the core self, the main body of the gem, is able to continue life as usual with much less trauma and interruption than it would otherwise experience. God designed the soul such that those fractured pieces don’t float off into the ethers and disappear; rather they stay tenuously connected to the main body of the soul gem. Our job as believers when working with others and their fragments is to reconnect those fragments back to the original soul, eventually causing the soul gem to be whole once more.

This might sound simple at first, but it can be a lengthy and involved process. In working with someone on my own fragment integration, I have learned a few things. First, let me point out that prior to learning about this subject, I didn’t actually think I had multiple personalities. I have since come to discover that not only do I have them, but literally everyone has them–and we just don’t know it. Likewise, every human on the planet has some measure of demonic influence in their life whether they are aware of it or not. Lack of awareness doesn’t make it any less there much in the same way that not being able to see wind makes it any less present during a storm.

Integrating fragments often involves casting demons out of the fragment, healing emotional wounds that the fragment carries, and working with it to change its erroneous beliefs and impart truth. Working directly with fragments is much more effective than praying with the person’s core self to try to get at fragment-related issues. One of a number of reasons for this is that fragments don’t share all of the same memories that the core self does. They are often located in a nondescript space somewhere in the spirit realm, and at times find themselves locked in some kind of prison or jail. They may or may not know Jesus, even if the core self has been a believer for years. I have been a believer since I was 3 years old, but while most of my fragments so far have at least heard of Jesus, some of them don’t know him or have a poor opinion of him in spite of the fact that I have deeply loved Jesus most of my life.

When I work with a prayer counselor on my fragments, he literally prays and asks for fragments to come up. What this means is that my core consciousness takes a bit of a back seat while these “other” consciousnesses start to express themselves. One fragment was an adult male who had a southern accent and kept biting his lip. Another was probably around age 5 and liked drawing airplanes–and I cannot recall ever having been a fan of drawing planes. I have seen some of the fragments start out as females and as God healed them, their gender changed to that of a male. I once had a teenage fragment who thought God the Father was angry and mean, but liked Jesus because he was kind and loving, and he had a fragment of his own that had fractured off to boot! Some of my fragments have been madly in love with Jesus while still others have never heard of him or only tolerate him at best. Some of them have heard of him but don’t know much about him or have never met him in person. I will never forget the time the 5-year old plane-drawing fragment met Jesus–he began to cry when he saw Jesus because “he’s so beautiful!” I was literally sitting there sobbing because Jesus is beautiful (and he is), but I, as my core self, was observing my actions from inside me with some detachment while this fragment was having an encounter with Jesus that I couldn’t see.

Please understand that I am being rather transparent in sharing this, and I understand that this may seem somewhat strange or completely made up to some, but I’ll be honest, as a nurse I have a somewhat scientific and logical mind and this is the last thing I would make up just for fun–because if it’s fake then it isn’t fun, just dumb. There’s nothing remotely humorous, glamorous, or interesting about making up spiritual experiences because if they never actually happened then it’s just blatant stupidity, which I have little tolerance for. I found this fragment-business a bit strange at first, and on some level still do, but if I am honest with myself it’s not really any more difficult to believe than the idea that the God of the entire universe decided to impregnate a virgin, become a human, grow up and die, only to come back to life a few days later with holes still in his hands, feet, and side, but not bleed to death again; who is both a lion, a lamb with horns, and a human all at once and is coming back someday on a white horse with a tattoo on his thigh to give us all white rocks and to take us to some other plane of existence to live happily ever after and eat leaves from special trees by a river, and the source of that river is underneath the throne of the king in the throne room of a temple. It’s not any stranger than having the God of the universe speak to me about someone’s life in a prophetic word, or casting a demon out of someone and watching their face involuntarily contort, or watch them vomit as the spirit comes out. It’s no less odd than gemstones, feathers, oil, gold dust, manna, or other supernatural objects appear in front of me miraculously from this alternate plane we call heaven.

When my core self takes a back seat during these sessions, I am able to hear, see, and interact as much as I want with everything that is going on. I personally have been able to have my core self take back over whenever I want, and up to now I have been fully aware of everything that happens when we work with my fragments. This is not the case for everyone, as I have heard stories from my prayer counselor of other clients where the core self basically goes to sleep and doesn’t remember any part of the session. Sometimes demons take over the person’s body and they start to talk through the person’s mouth. It is possible for the person to remember this but be unable to control himself, but it is equally possible for the person to have no recollection whatsoever.

I had one encounter with a friend, unrelated to my own prayer counseling, where he suddenly began manifesting a demon, and didn’t remember it after the fact, and he related to us what happened when the demon had taken over his body and his core consciousness had been pushed under. The story is found on my blog titled “Breaking Free From a Spirit of Divination” but this demon revealed its presence during a gathering with friends as we were praying for healing for his neck pain. An excerpt from that blog is as follows:

“This spirit had hidden itself quite nicely for approximately forty years, only to be unearthed now from its hiding place. And when I say ‘unearthed,’ Chris was basically unconscious and the demon had control of his eyes and vocal cords. The fact is that this demon made it that long largely because demons operate under the principle of ‘be heard but not seen.’ What I mean by that is that they will whisper all sorts of lies into the host’s mind and plant ideas that the host doesn’t realize aren’t actually his thoughts to begin with, but they will usually talk in first person to make it sound like the host is thinking them instead of the thoughts being planted. In fact, this demon STILL didn’t really want to be made known because even when we spoke directly to it, the thing only answered in very short phrases using as few words as possible.

My prayer counselor was kind enough to explain to me at a later date that the spirit didn’t talk much because it wanted to give as little information as possible, but that when that spirit is talking to us, THAT is the moment to treat it like an interrogation session and pump that spirit for as much information as possible: how did it get in there, how many other spirits are there, what are their names or functions, who is the spirit in charge of that spirit-cluster, etc. The more information you can gather from the spirit, the better prepared you are to deal with it and its companions.

Interestingly enough, after dealing with the root point of access (in this case it was a childhood friend and the use of an Ouija board), we had the opportunity to ask Chris what his experience was while we were dealing with the demon. He didn’t remember a single thing we had said or done from the time we started praying and his neck started having severe pain until we cast the demon out and he regained full consciousness. What had happened was that he was still awake, more or less, but that his consciousness had gotten pushed under and the spirit’s consciousness was now the one on top and was talking with us. However, Chris was able to tell us what he DID experience when he was under. He said he felt he was in this enclosed space and he wanted to get out, so he started pushing against a wall. However, this wall was a little like rubber and it was just bending with his pushing instead of giving way. He kept pushing, and at one point in time he pushed and the wall gave way and he was out. That moment that the wall gave way was the same moment that we case the spirit of divination out. After that, we prayed for him and Chris began to have visions of fields and fields of flowers. He was just so absolutely amazed by these tons of flowers and the beauty that God was showing him with these flowers. While it might sound a little silly, God was restoring that place in his soul that had been occupied by that spirit, and God was bringing back everything the enemy had stolen from Chris and demonstrated that to him with visions of beautiful flowers.”

While inner healing and deliverance sessions are often less dramatic than that one, they have the potential to get interesting when working with the spirit realm. The major benefit of this form of healing prayer is that it bypasses the conscious mind and gets at root issues, saving possibly months and years of time in prayer counseling. Working directly with a fragment, we are able to healing its inner wounds, perform deliverance on it and correct its inaccurate beliefs, and then reintegrate it into the core self. As this happens, the individual becomes more resilient, more able to deal with life stressors, and incidentally more able to function in Kingdom power and authority. Since the soul is no longer divided into so many damaged parts, the individual doesn’t have as much internal “double-mindedness”. There are no longer multiple “streams” flowing from the same source, but one clear gushing river of life that flows into everything he does.

We can learn to identify the presence and/or manifestation of a fragment any time we have an emotional overreaction in a situation or what I refer to as a “trigger.” When we encounter a situation that hits a little too close to home for a fragment based on its past trauma–trauma that it often re-lives on a daily basis, we have unnecessary reactions, often verbally lashing out in anger at a spouse, panic attacks, unexplained anxiety, or other emotions that if we were an outside observer, we would recognize were abnormal to the situation. When noticing these triggers, I tend to write them down and bring them to my counselor for prayer, but when doing it alone we can take those same triggers to God in prayer, ask Him to reveal the fragmented part that is hurting, and ask Him to show us how to heal and integrate it into our core self.

For those interested in more information specifically on how to recognize and heal fragments and alters, check out my coauthored book Broken to Whole: Inner Healing for the Fragmented Soul.

You can also check out the Fragment Finder flower essence from Freedom Flowers .

In the next installment of this series we will look at limiting beliefs–what they are, how they influence us, and how we can change them.

Divine Healing that Works- The Complete Series

Part 1 – The Root Cause

Part 2 – Demons and Deliverance

Part 3 – Fragments

Part 4 – Limiting Beliefs

Part 5 – Casting Out Demons

Part 6 – Emotional Healing

Part 7 – Triggers and Healing Fragments

Part 8 – Faith For Healing

Part 9 – Power and Authority For Healing