My Divine Appointment with Ann

Every night at the hospital is different.  Some are busy with good old-fashioned hard work.  Some nights are extremely peaceful, everyone seems to be sleeping well, and are generally doing okay.  Occasionally I will have a night where it is evident that God is doing something more overt than usual.  Now, to be fair, God is always doing things in our lives, but it is usually when we don’t expect it that memorable things occur.  I remember years ago hearing prophet Larry Randolph say something that has always stuck with me, “In the midst of the mundane, the supernatural happens.”  Often it is in the middle of the most mundane and unextraordinary things that we see God do the spectacular, the fascinating, and the life-giving.  My friend Diane calls these encounters “divine appointments”.  My night with a patient named Ann (not her actual name) was one such memorable time, and I want to share the story of that night and the various things God did during my Divine Appointment with Ann.

I was working in the float pool at the time, which is a lot like being a substitute nurse for whatever floor has a nurse call in sick, etc., and was assigned to a PCU/Telemetry floor that particular night (a lot of heart-related health problems and people not well enough to be on a normal floor but not sick enough for the ICU).  Ann was one of my patients that night.  She was in her 70’s, if I remember correctly, and she just had this really enjoyable atmosphere or aura about her.  I forget how it started, but we ended up talking a bit about our lives, which then caused us to delve into a conversation about spirituality.  She grew up in the Episcopal Church like I did, but somewhere along the line she moved into shamanism.  I am not entirely sure why she asked me, but she asked me how to overcome fear and we began to talk about God’s love.  She shared with me some different spiritual encounters she had over the years (which I always love hearing about).  We even had a moment where we just stared at each other silently.  And while that normally would be really strange to do, we both just felt this unconditional love for one another and without discussing it, we both fell silent to just be in the moment with the other.  The silence in sharing of love must have lasted for at least a minute, and may even have been longer, but it was profound.  I’m not actually sure if I have had an encounter like that before, and I know I have not since.  We didn’t need to explain it to the other and we didn’t need to even discuss what had happened because in that moment of connection and love we just knew what it was and knew the other was encountering the same thing.  It was an expression of Divine Love being shared between us on a deep level.

At one point I was going to get her some pain medication for a headache she had, and given that we were already discussing things spiritual, I offered to pray for her.  You might think I pray for all of my patients, and it might surprise you to hear that I don’t.  There are times that I pray for them or over them without their awareness, releasing healing and life to them, but it is actually fairly rare that I directly offer to a patient to pray for them.  It isn’t because I’m ashamed of my faith or because I don’t think God can help them, but in current USA work culture you have to be wise about when you put those sorts of offers out there for people, and also I am often just focused on the more physical nature of my job, so it doesn’t always come up.  I commanded her headache to leave and it did, so she didn’t need the pain medication any longer—which she was happy with because she, like I, don’t prefer to use pharmaceuticals if we don’t need to.

During one of our conversations that night, I was looking in the spirit and saw a black object sticking out of her right shoulder.  When I told her about what I saw, she told me she had actually seen it on her pillow earlier that night, but in the mental space she was in it hadn’t occurred to her to “vanquish it” (her term) like she normally would.  I removed the black object in the spirit, and as I did this I saw God clothe her with a rainbow cloak.  I didn’t honestly know what it meant, so I just shared the vision with her.  Interestingly, she then told me that every morning during her morning meditations, she would pray and release life upon our government, her family, and so on, and that each morning while she would do this, she would put on what she referred to as her “spiritual raiment”.  What I loved about that is that in many ways it sounds similar to what I would call putting on the “Armor of God” that is referenced in Ephesians 6:10-18.  And even though she didn’t follow the Episcopal church’s version of faith at that point, she was still doing something that fairly matched it anyway.

I don’t have any profound message to share about this particular encounter or a special set of takeaways, except maybe that we need to remember to enjoy the moments in life even when they feel mundane.  Because it is in the middle of those mundane moments, those times of boredom or monotony, and often when we feel the least spiritual because we aren’t praying or doing anything overtly “Godly” that He reaches into our day and causes us to encounter Him, to have moments to share His love and goodness with others, and more.  And like God did with Ann and I, maybe we’ll even just share a moment of experiencing deep and wordless love for one another and Him.  After all, like prophet Larry Randolph said, “In the midst of the mundane, the supernatural happens.”

What is Pre-Incarnation and Why Does it Matter?

I was on a Zoom call the other day and we got onto the topic of pre-incarnation— the idea that we existed in the heavens in eternity before our spirits incarnated into our bodies and formed a living soul.  What brought it up was somebody mentioning the idea that we choose the type of pain we will experience in our life—and how for some, this can be a difficult concept to reconcile with their belief in God.  Because why would God pre-choose suffering for me? That idea doesn’t seem to match with a good and loving Heavenly Father.  In this article, I will try to help reconcile some of the perspective about a pre-incarnation existence in heaven and choosing our incarnation, with the fact of God’s nature being good and loving and kind, etc.

As with most things, I think we need to begin by understanding Jesus is our model.  When I look at Jesus as our model, I see that Hebrews 12:1 says this of him: “for the joy set before him endured the suffering of the cross. Therefore let us run our race.”  It wasn’t that God desired suffering for us so He sent us to incarnate into the earth.  Rather, it’s that in order to incarnate into a fallen world that needs restoration, it was a fact that we would experience pain, suffering, and problems.  I believe that our Heavenly Father is a good God, and so I believe that He actually gave us a choice with *disclosure* of what we would face.  Our Father wasn’t simply condemning us to some sort of painful 3-D reality, bur rather He invited us into a partnership with Him to restore the cosmos. One that He knew would cost us each individually, but ultimately was going to cost us far less than it cost Jesus.

If I back up a bit and explain this concept of pre-incarnation which I have sometimes referred to as preexistence, there are a few different Bible verses that point to this being a possibility.  I say “possibility” because the Bible doesn’t explicitly state the level of depth of pre-incarnation experience that I’m talking about, but it does hint at the fact that there was some sort of “ before” that we each experienced in some sort of conscious manner.  To explain from the scriptures, I am pulling a quote from my book The Gamer’s Guide to the Kingdom of God.  This comes from the first chapter of the book.

 

“Numerous verses in the Bible point to this reality of predestination or pre-choice.  Jeremiah 1:4-5 says, “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’”  This says God had already chosen Jeremiah to be a prophet long before Jeremiah was born, but that’s not all it says.  This passage suggests Jeremiah and God had a discussion about it.  To know someone is an active and ongoing process, not simply a momentary absorption of knowledge.  According to Strong’s Concordance the word know in this passage is the Hebrew word ‘yada’, which is not just a factual head-knowledge, but a perception, discernment, and understanding of a person or thing by experience and acquaintance.  Simply put, God said he knew Jeremiah because he didn’t just know about him, but that God and he knew each other relationally before Jeremiah came to earth as a baby.  Thus, Jeremiah had pre-existed in Heaven.  Furthermore, the word ‘appointed’ in the above passage is the Hebrew word ‘nathan’ which means to appoint, consecrate, bestow upon or put onto.  The very nature of that definition suggests that God didn’t just have an idea in his head but actually held a ceremony of some kind in heaven to consecrate Jeremiah and bestowed that office upon him.

Psalm 139:16 says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”  Simply put, David recognizes here that God actually wrote a book about David before David was even born.  Both this passage and the passage from Jeremiah point to the reality of our pre-existence.  Here, David recognizes and has some memory or revelation of the fact that his destiny—the choices he pre-determined to make before coming to earth—were decided and recorded in heaven before he became a living being.”

 

Jeremiah mentioned God knowing him experientially before he was formed in his mother‘s womb . And I clarify above that it was experiential because the Hebrew word yada means to know something by experience.  It wasn’t simply that Jeremiah was a concept in God‘s mind before he incarnated, but that there was an experiential relational knowledge that God had of interacting with him in some way before he incarnated. Whether there are any other verses that discussed this or not, there are at least two places where the Bible communicates that there is something that happens *before* we incarnate more than simply not-existing or being a thought in God’s mind.

Something else to consider is that in the New Testament in 1 Peter 1:20-21 it says that Christ was foreknown apart from the foundations of the world, ie. outside of space time, but that he was manifest (incarnated) for us at that time.  It is the same Greek word (conjugated differently) as the one in Romans 8:29 that says for those of us He foreknew He predestined to be conformed into Christ’s image. I think no one would argue that Jesus was only a thought in the Father’s mind. And it is the same word used to describe us in “the before.”

A bit more anecdotally, I have a few friends who actually have preexistence memories.  I even once wrote a post on social media asking others to share any pre-incarnation memories or experiences, and in less than 24 hours I had ten different people who either had either had their own experience of pre-incarnation or knew of someone else who had one.  I personally find this to be an interesting phenomenon because most people when they incarnate either at the time of incarnation or sometime in very early childhood seem to forget whatever came *before*. Chinese mythology actually has a belief that explains this to a certain degree.  In Chinese lore, Granny Meng waits at a bridge by the six springs of reincarnation.  Before someone reincarnates they have to drink from her bowl of water or soup or whatever it is, and when they do they forget all memories of their past life. Now, I don’t believe reincarnation is God‘s plan for us, nor is it something I teach.  I do, however, find it quite fascinating that there is an existing cultural mythology to explain this phenomenon of forgetting an existence prior to our current life, as much mythology has at least a grain of truth to it.  This overall idea would explain why there is such a disconnect between who we have always been in eternity and what happens when we incarnate into a body and form a soul.

Now, before going further, I want to be clear about something—this is honestly optional cosmology. You can be a Christian and you absolutely don’t have to believe this. There are some things in Christianity and in life is a whole that we really have the freedom to pick and choose what we do or don’t believe because the ramifications of believing or disbelieving that thing are fairly small. I personally want to know more Truth, if for no other reason than because I believe everything in creation fits together the way it was designed, and I would rather understand the way God made it, free of veil and mystery and confusion. And for a variety of reasons, including the ones I have shared above, this feels right to my spirit, so until God clarifies something further, this is what I believe about this subject.

I want people to know that this is optional not because reading this article automatically forces you to believe what I am saying, but because I think sometimes we get into situations where we feel like we have to make a decision for our theology to move forward.  And I don’t want anyone feeling stuck over this.  Yes, more and more people are coming into revelation about this, and I personally believe that is simply because it is true.  But I also don’t think there’s any real harm that is done if for some reason someone chooses not to believe it.  On the converse, even if it isn’t accurate, provided we take the right perspective on it I also think it has little to no ability to cause harm.

And this may sound like a strange disclaimer to make, but I want to briefly explain something about beliefs, discernment, and harm before we dive back into preincarnation.  We all have things we believe that aren’t true.  The problem is that we *don’t know* they’re not true or we wouldn’t believe them.  Healthy people, anyway, want to believe truth and are willing to adjust their thinking once they learn new information.  So whenever I come across new beliefs that force me to look at making significant shifts in some area of my belief system, especially when it just feels “right/true” in my spirit, I do a bit of a risk analysis.  If I am completely wrong, what is the potential harm of accepting this belief as true over and above what I have been believing before?  If the risks are low and/or approaching zero and the benefits are good or at least no worse than the previous belief, you’re likely just fine to switch to the new belief system, especially if it feels like God is already confirming it in your spirit.

Back to the subject of pre-incarnation, I want to lay out why this matters that we understand this.  If it causes us to believe that God is afflicting us with something harmful then I could see how that would be a very toxic belief.  It would cause us to believe that God is not in fact, good, that He’s not actually very loving, and that He doesn’t actually care about us much at all, because no good Father would intentionally subject someone to the level of abuse and pain that He would knowingly be subjecting us to unless there was a deeper reason behind it.  But I believe there *is* a deeper reason for it, and a good one.  I believe that God spoke to each of us individually in advance and gave us each a choice because we each had a mission to play—a role in the redemption of all creation.  We have to remember that the Bible says Jesus is the firstborn of many brothers, but *we* are the brothers. Meaning, our eldest brother paved the way for the rest of us to come, and the rest of us are here to finish the job in restoring all creation back to full union with the Father. Honestly, it’s a noble mission, and one that I’m rarely sorry for agreeing to.  Is it hard sometimes? Absolutely.  But I believe that’s a significant part of why God gave us a choice in advance—because He knew that things would get tough and be painful and hard at times. But He also knew that there would be joy set before us that would help us to endure every trial and tribulation and problem that we would face.  And then, as I mentioned in a previous article, Jesus already conquered every enemy that we would face, so restoring creation is not an impossible task.  It’s an extremely doable one.

About two years I was in a time of prayer and encounter with the Lord and He showed me the globe of the Earth. And as He did, so, I began to see represented before me in the vision all of the problems and opportunities that humanity was facing at the time He was showing me.  What made it interesting is that while I was very clear that God was showing me both problems and opportunities, there were zero problems and only opportunities. And that seems strange at first until we understand that with the right perspective, *everything* is an opportunity. My friend Barry Maracle has a saying that I absolutely love, but which I am also going to butcher a bit.  The general gist of it is that opposition is not meant to delay or deny you, but to propel you into your destiny.  Every obstacle that we face is an opportunity to conform into the image of Christ Jesus. It’s an opportunity to trust the Father one more time.  But a little bit more this time than the last time. It’s an opportunity for God to reveal a new aspect of His nature as provider, protector, or some other aspect of His being that He wants to reveal to us.  Problems aren’t enjoyable, but with the right perspective, they are opportunities.  I believe likewise that this belief in pre-incarnation is an opportunity.  It’s an invitation, taking one or two deeper steps into fulfilling the plans and purposes of God in this generation.  And I believe understanding pre-incarnation helps clarify some of our purpose and position here on the Earth.

I want to share with you three more examples that point to the reality of pre-incarnation to leave you with more data-points to consider about all of this.  The first example is that of a friend of my ex-wife’s who we will call “Katy.”  She once had a dream where she was talking to an infant girl planning on coming to earth.  Katy told her it wasn’t the right time to do so, and shortly after this dream she had an early first-trimester miscarriage—early enough that she hadn’t even known she was pregnant until the miscarriage occurred.  Katy was not even aware she was pregnant, but her spirit knew and told the baby it was not time to incarnate yet.  Keep in mind that this is only possible if there is a not-yet-incarnated person in the spirit realms who she can talk to in order to tell her not to incarnate into a body.

A second example is that of Kat Kerr, a prophetess who travels and speaks to various churches about her revelation on heaven and who has taken multiple trips to heaven herself.  She speaks in a number of her messages, including at meetings I have personally attended, that we are all spirits that exist in heaven with God beforehand and how we choose to come down to earth, knowing our parents and families and the trials and difficulties we will face, which closely matches what I have been saying.

Third is the well-known minister Jesse DuPlantis who was taken into a heavenly visitation which he recounts in the video and audio recording titled Close Encounters of the God Kind.  In that message, he shares that he saw in heaven a great many spirits going up to the throne where God was seated and these spirits clamored excitedly, asking God to send them to be human spirits here on earth.  As Jesse watched, he saw God take a deep breath and as he exhaled those spirits were sent from heaven into bodies here on earth, much like in Genesis 2:7 where it says that God breathed spirit into Adam and he became a living soul.

Because eternity operates outside of the realm of time, it is not bound by our human understanding of time.  God and each human spirit have decided together when in history we will be born and to what set of parents.  Before conception, we are shown in heaven what our life will be like on earth, including the problems we will face physically, emotionally, and even spiritually.  As hard as this is for some to believe, we chose to be here in this time and place.  We did not create the physical circumstances, but we did pre-know and willingly choose to enter the body that would accompany those traits.  The good news about all of this is that if we agreed with the Father to come here, then it means we were sent on a mission and *also* were properly equipped for the task.  God doesn’t sabotage people.  If He asked us to incarnate here in this time and place, then He already had a plan to meet us at every turn.  He already foreknew the challenge we would face, and in many ways we were picked because we were *more* capable of dealing with those things than anyone else!  Think about it.  No matter what difficulty I face in life, it’s probably a good thing I’m the one dealing with it because anyone else would be less-prepared than I am to deal with that task.  Its my life and God asked me for a *reason*.

 

I hope this is enlightening and encouraging for you, but if nothing else, keep in mind that God the Father and Jesus have been clearly expressed to be one and the same in nature and purpose.  So regardless of what you choose to walk away with as a belief, know that the Father’s nature was revealed in Jesus, so whatever we believe, we have to remember that Jesus is perfect theology, and let our understanding of the Father reflect that.  Be well and be blessed!

There Is No Such Thing As Christian Reiki

I want to take some time today to expose and expound on something that I see pop up from time to time in Christian circles—people who practice what they are calling “Christian Reiki”.  It seems to happen most often when people either don’t understand about the gifts of the spirit and our authority in Christ or when they are legitimately hungry for more and start looking elsewhere for answers. And before going further, I believe the heart motivation of these individuals are in the right place.  They desire good things for people and they want to see them healed and restored and have everything that God plans for their life. The problem is the methodology.  There is no such thing as Christian Reiki because Christianity and Reiki are inherently in opposition to one another.

Let me clearly and unequivocally state that Reiki is demonic. I cannot tell you how many times I have made that statement to Reiki-practicing Christians and their first response is to tell me that I just don’t understand. Believe it or not, it is actually possible to call something demonic because I understand it, not because I don’t.  Sometimes when we call things demonic or evil it’s quite simply because the thing is demonic and evil, not because of ignorance and misunderstanding on our part.  And Reiki fits the bill.  So what do I mean when I say “demonic”?  What I mean is that the function of the practice of Reiki comes from demonic activity. There is no way to practice Reiki without this demonic involvement because if it didn’t include the demonic activity then it wouldn’t, by definition, be Reiki.

Let me explain. In my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality I have a chapter where I explain the difference between primary and secondary energy, what you could potentially consider to be creative light and created light. Creative light is that which comes directly from God and, as you can guess, is the power of creation. Created light is the energy that exists in all things and has already been created. Hebrews 1:3 references this when it explains that Jesus is the representation of God‘s glory who sustained all things by the emanation of his power/word/energy.  Created light is the sustenance of Jesus Christ into all creation that allows us to continue to exist. Energy work, or energy healing, is the practice of harnessing that secondary energy and applying it to people and things to heal or restore them. It’s honestly really easy to do, and you don’t need any special abilities to be able to do it. Simply being a human means you possess the bodily technology to be able to do that.

On the other hand, Reiki is a specific school/process/practice of energy medicine that teaches people how to do this. It uses a series of sounds, hand symbols, and hand positions on parts of the body to reach the desired results. There are various things I could say about all of that, but without getting into the weeds on the methodology itself (which could be an article all on its own), I want to hone in on the nature of what Reiki is so we can understand why I not only differentiate it from energy medicine practices as a whole and also why I specifically single it out as being demonic.  Keep in mind that by singling out Reiki it doesn’t mean that every other form or version or school of energy medicine practice out there is demon-free, just that Reiki itself is inextricably tainted.  And here’s why:

By definition, it is impossible for someone to be a Reiki practitioner if they have not received something called a Reiki “attunement”. If someone uses all of the hand positions and everything else but has not received a Reiki attunement from an existing practitioner, then they are not, by definition, practicing Reiki.  They’re just doing energy medicine and borrowing Reiki techniques.  For something to be Reiki, it requires a process of impartation from an existing Reiki practitioner.  This impartation, called an attunement, is supposed to open up the individual to be able to channel this universal secondary energy all around us.  The man who initially received the download about Reiki was a man named Usui who was meditating on a mountain somewhere, and had a spiritual encounter of some kind.  During this encounter he was given the basics of Reiki practice, then began to pass this down to disciples. Now, in my book The Power of Impartation I go into some depth explaining what impartation is and how it works, but quite simply impartation is the releasing a spiritual virtue from one person to another, usually through the laying on of hands. It is called impartation because there is a spiritual substance or an energy that is being passed or “imparted” from one person to the other.  And this gets to the crux of why Reiki is demonic.

As I mentioned before, it is impossible to practice Reiki if one does not receive a Reiki attunement. A Reiki attunement is a demonic impartation, or said another way, it is an impartation of demonic access to manipulate and utilize secondary energy. It is already an ability we innately possess as humans. We don’t actually need a Reiki attunement to be able to practice energy work because it’s already built into our design. This is the same lie that the serpent gave to Eve when he told her to eat the fruit.  The serpent told her that if she ate the fruit that she would be like God.  The truth was that in Genesis 1 it tells us she was already made in God’s image, which means she was already like Him. The serpent got her to try to do something extra in order for her to become who she already was.  Likewise, we don’t need Reiki attunements to work with secondary energy because it’s already part of who we are.  However, when we receive this impartation, when we come into agreement with this demonic form of energy healing, we give certain spirits access to the realm of our soul so they can do whatever they want without our knowledge.  People who do this welcome these spirits in while believing the lie that they are doing something good for themselves and for others.  The reason I am so vocal about this when I talk to people is because Reiki is a form of demonic entrapment, preying on people’s good intentions.  It is the epitome of the enemy masquerading as an angel of light to make it appear that something is good and life-giving when in fact, it is not.

Now, let’s be clear about this—I’m not saying that Reiki doesn’t work.  I’m not saying that people who have gone to Reiki practitioners will get no benefits.  That’s part of what makes the deception so effective.  When somebody receives a Reiki attunement they will be working with secondary energy and they can do stuff with it. I never said it doesn’t work. I said it’s demonic. The agreements that the practitioner has to make are inherently allowing demons access to their soul realm, and if somebody goes to that practitioner to receive treatment, I can’t guarantee that they’re not making similar agreements as well. But because all of this looks and sounds nice and because the people practicing it genuinely care and truly want people to be healed and whole, Reiki often slides under the radar. And that’s why I began my entire article by saying that I believe the heart motivation of everybody involved is really very good. I don’t believe that most people would willingly tell others about a harmful energy practice that opens you up to the demonic if they truly understood it was a harmful practice.  They do it because they are genuinely ignorant of the deeper truth about it, and because they want people to be healed and have good lives.  Their hearts are in the right place.  The problem isn’t their heart motivation, the problem is the agreements they’ve made with demonic entities.

I have wanted to heal people for much of my life. It’s not a coincidence that I’m a nurse. I pray for the sick and expect God to heal them. I very much engage God’s divine healing power to touch others, and while I don’t do it very often, I also can do energy work on people.  As I said earlier, it’s honestly not hard. It’s just not half as beneficial as taking power authority over sickness and disease, doing some inner healing, and watching God touch someone and heal them And since doing energy work is largely more time consuming for less results, it’s simply something I rarely do any longer.   It doesn’t mean I can’t do it, it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it, it doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of it, it just means that I choose not to because there are faster and better ways to do it.

If anyone who is reading this has gotten caught in the trap that is Reiki, I want to encourage you to give it up.  And by “give it up” I mean stop practicing it, renounce your participation in it, get rid of your Reiki paraphernalia, and get some inner healing and deliverance to get fully free from the connection with the spirits involved.  If you honor God by choosing to walk in His truth, He will set you free and He will bring something along that is even better than what you feel like you are giving up.  I understand that it feels like a loss because again, the only people who are doing Reiki are people who want others to be healed. and I love that about you.  I love that that’s your heart.  And I want you to be free to walk in the fullness of everything that God has planned for you in that, but you will never be able to walk in the fullness of that as long as you are practicing Reiki because to be a Christian and practice Reiki is to serve two masters, and the Bible is pretty clear that doing so doesn’t end well.

If you want to learn more about what I have been saying about impartation and primary and secondary energy, as well as God’s plans for us for life and how to live it out to the fullest, I encourage you to get copies of my books The Power of Impartation and The Gospel of Life and Immortality, both of which are available in print, on Kindle, and Audible.

My First Encounter with the Electromagnetic Force

Back in January of 2024 I was at one Fiorella Giordano’s second GenNow conference and had the opportunity to hear Justin Paul Abraham share with a small group of us a method he uses to help people step into spiritual encounters and to engage with the Cloud of Witnesses.  The method itself is fairly simple.  You envision a door—and that door can look however want it to.  It can be floating in space, it can be a door at the end of a hallway in your house or the one that goes outside.  It can be a physical door you have seen before or one you completely imagine.  It can be any shape, color, or size, but ultimately it’s a door that *you* envision and that you like.  That door represents your access to the spiritual realms through Jesus, who Himself declared in John 10 that He is the door for His sheep.  When we step through that door we are engaging the heavens through the person of Jesus Christ, and then we see what happens in the encounter that unfolds.  Justin shared this with us and then took us through a short activation exercise to practice this method with our spiritual door.  I forget exactly what I saw at the time, but it was a good practice opportunity using that method.

Later that evening I was back in my hotel room and I decided I was going to engage in the heavens and see what else God wanted to do, so I went back to that same door I had designed earlier, stepped through the door, and was on the top of a grassy hill with this zebra-looking animal standing in front of me.  The sky was filled with dark grey-black clouds and had lightning streaking across it.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first because we don’t typically associate darkness with God, so I was trying to discern what I was encountering.  However, we have to remember that the Bible does have a verse that says God is surrounded by thick darkness and another one where I believe it says he wraps himself in lightning—so while uncommon, this wasn’t necessarily ungodly, just unexpected.

I approached this zebra-like creature and it wanted me to climb on its back so it could take me somewhere.  I still wasn’t sure what was happening, but I decided to risk it and see what transpired.  I climbed on his back and he began to take off.  And by “take off” I mean he began running into the air.  As we did so, this circular black space opened up in front of us, like a wormhole or black hole, he ran into it, and then weird stuff happened.  It’s hard to describe because the sensation was not something that I think a three-dimensional physical body can sustain, but its like there was this strong sense of compression and we basically shrank to a subatomic level.  There wasn’t light where I was, but it still didn’t feel evil, just lacking light.  It felt like I was in the space between things—like the empty space between electrons and protons in an atom.  I became acutely aware of this being who was present around me.  Not around me as in “I was surrounded”, but I kind of was surrounded by it, just not in a threatening way.  But more it felt like the focus of its self-ness was in front of me, and without words being used I got this sense that I was encountering the Electromagnetic Force.

For a small bit of background before going further, the body of knowledge we call “Science” has discovered four forces that govern interactions at a subatomic level, and those four forces are called the Strong force, Weak force, Electromagnetism, and Gravity.  Once I realized I was dealing with the Electromagnetic Force, it made much more sense that the sky was filled with lightning when I first arrived.  On a scientific level, electromagnetism deals with the interactions of charged particles, such as the electrical charge created between protons and electrons, or between charged molecules in ionic reactions.  Lightning occurs when an electrical charge builds up in the clouds and when it reaches a certain point, that charge discharges in the bolt of energy we can see to neutralize the buildup of opposing positive and negative energies.

Now that I was “face to face” with this force, I wasn’t honestly sure what to do, as to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything in particular to begin with.  This had all been a result of me deciding to further activate spiritual encounters and see what happened, and now I was having a meeting of sorts with a subatomic Force of Creation.  Having not had regular meetings with Forces in the past, I wasn’t sure if there is some type of spiritual “etiquette” one should follow when meeting them, if they even care about that kind of thing, and what level of sentience a Force has.  I can assume that if I was brought to it to meet that it was indeed sentient, although clearly it doesn’t have a physical body like we do.  But I was encountering it in the spirit, so it would make perfect sense if it was a sentient spirit without a body, and its primary job is to govern over the electromagnetic force in all creation.

And that was pretty much the end of the encounter.  I didn’t know what to do, and the zebra-creature brought me back to the hill top.  I got the sense that what had happened was an introduction and that we would have further encounters later, or at the very least that I was invited to have further encounters with it later.  I also think that sometimes when we step out in faith with something new, God meets us there with new things that bring expansion to us—expansion to our understanding, to our idea of what limitations we have as He brings us ever toward limitlessness, etc.  I still don’t entirely understand a year and a half later what the point of that was.  But it did get me thinking—if there is a sentient Electromagnetic Force in creation, couldn’t the same be said of the other three?  (I later spoke to a friend who has encountered the Force of Gravity, so it turns out that yes, indeed, they are all sentient spirits)

Now I made one major mistake, or maybe I should call it a miscalculation, in all of this.  I did this after a conference session—the last session of the day.  So it was evening.  And I did this after I got back to my room, which was after I went out for a late dinner with friends.  In other words, it was like eleven o’clock at night when I stepped into this encounter, and after coming out of it, I was wired.  Wide awake.  Full of energy.  Absolutely not going to be able to fall asleep.  And if I think about it, it kind of makes sense that my body might be full of energy considering I had encountered a being who basically governs electricity, which is something the nervous system runs on. . .  So.  I went down to the hotel gym, ran two miles, and went to bed around 2 am.

I’ll be honest, I usually like to close with some kind of profound thought or meaningful takeaway, but the main thing I’ll suggest is that if you decide to engage spiritual stuff late at night, be well-aware that you might be laying in bed wide awake for hours, so plan accordingly.  Other than that, I don’t actually quite know what to do with this encounter I had, and although I have gone back to visit since, there was really nothing meaningful that I could understand to share that came out of it, so I’m still a bit clueless at this point.  But.  It was a cool encounter and if nothing else it opened me up to the idea that there is a lot more out there that God has for us to experience.  I share this partly because I hope it does the same for you—that we would not box ourselves in with rigid limitations when it comes to spiritual encounters and be open to everything that God has for us.

 

Seeking After Signs: What Does The Bible Say?

The Charismatic denominations are a funny place, and if you listen to what every teacher or preacher says about how to receive from God, how to operate in the gifts of the spirit, whether to seek after God’s face or his hand, how to receive answered prayer or see miracles, or anything similar, you are bound to get spiritual whiplash, because every time you turn around someone is going to be telling you something different.  One person will tell you to intercede fervently to get your prayers answered.  Another will tell you not to pray for them to be answered but to thank God that they are already answered until it happens.  Yet another will tell you to “praise” God for it instead of praying—which at best I can assume means that you’re still thanking God but with music this time.  It can get very difficult to know whether it’s okay to ask God for things or if asking Him for things is bad because different people will tell you different things.  One will tell you to only seek God’s face, which in this context means to engage Him relationally and not ask Him for anything, and then you will receive everything in His hands that He is holding for you.  Another will tell you to ask Him for what you need because the Bible directly states to do so, and so you should ask Him for what you need but also believe you have already received it or else you won’t get anything.  This is all just plain confusing.

Most people want to know how to get their prayers answered, and some (like me) take it a step further and want to know how to operate consistently in the gifts of the Spirit and live a supernatural lifestyle.  Some of us even believe that God wants us to be able to do these things at our command (I do an hour-long teaching about this called Miracles Today, available on Youtube).  I want to help bring some clarity to this topic not by doing just one more teaching to give you even more whiplash, but by bringing some *context* to what the Bible says about seeking after signs, wonders, and miracles.

If we quote certain passages with no context and then match them with other passages that equally contain no context, then we can easily come to the conclusion that seeking after and operating in signs, wonders, and miracles is not the will of God for us.  I have heard said multiples of times over the years in conversations I was personally in some variation of the idea that we should only seek intimacy with God and then everything else will automatically come to us.  The idea is that whether spiritual gifts, financial provision, spiritual power, miracles, etc., so long as we “seek His face” and engage God relationally in love, then we automatically get everything else.  I have yet to find that to be true, and challenge anyone to show me that practice consistently bearing the kind of fruit I am referencing. Sure, we can find a few people here and there where it worked out for them, but it doesn’t yield results consistently, which means ignoring spiritual power and assuming it’s going to head my way eventually isn’t actually a reliable means of operating in spiritual power.

It is extremely easy to find believers who love God and yet who also can’t even heal a headache in prayer.  There is no special award for being a powerless Christian, but we collectively act like it is the pious stance to take, when in reality what Jesus both did and taught was to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, strength, etc. and also He went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil.  He did miracles all over Israel and taught his disciples to do the same, then passed that mandate on to each of us as well (Matthew 28:20).  It is impossible to do a sensible read-through of the Bible and come away with the conclusion that we are not meant to operate in the miraculous, but people manage to do it anyway.  Jesus didn’t pick and choose one or the other, and He certainly didn’t teach his disciples to do so either. And if neither Jesus nor the early disciples held this belief, I suggest we shouldn’t either.  But let’s take a look at some interactions Jesus had on this subject and see what the Bible says.

In John 6 we see Jesus feeding the five-thousand by multiplying bread and fish.  This story is found in each of the gospels, but what is interesting (which you will hear me expound on this more if you go listen to my teaching on Youtube) is that in John 6:5-6 Jesus tests Philip on whether or not he knows how to perform a miracle.  You see, the text tells us that Jesus had already pre-planned to perform a miracle, which is the only way He could have been able to test Philip on it.  And when does a teacher test the students?  When the teacher wants to see how well the students are learning the material.  Jesus wasn’t expecting Philip to just love Him a lot and then have the bread multiply on its own with no influence on Philip’s part.  No, Jesus was actively teaching His disciples how to perform miracles, which means He can’t be all that upset when we actually obey His teachings and seek out how to do the same things He was already teaching the disciples to do.  No, I think Jesus would commend our obedience instead.

It goes a step further though.  If we jump down to John 6:25-31 we see the people flocking after Jesus, and Jesus comments that they are not looking for him because of his signs, but because of the food.  He cautions them about their motives, which is key to note, urging them to seek a different type of spiritual sustenance, and in response they ask Jesus an interesting question, which is quite telling.  John 6:30-31 says, “So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’’”  They specifically expected Jesus to perform some kind of miracle in order for them to believe what He was saying, and then they referenced their ancestors eating manna in the wilderness under Moses as the example or template they were going off of.

For us to understand this passage and to provide Biblical/cultural context, it is important to note that the expectation the crowd had of Jesus was a sign, and that this was normal for Jews.  Jews grew up hearing about all of the signs and wonders that God performed when bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, and the writers of the Psalms wrote about them often.  Culturally, Jews expected to see signs and miracles because their belief in God was largely based on visible evidence and/or testimonies or stories from others of past evidence.

We see this same tendency of Jews to seek after signs noted by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:22-24.  It says, “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom.  But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”

Paul didn’t actually have a problem with the Jews seeking a sign, nor did Jesus.  And God doesn’t reject wisdom just because Greeks sought after it.  God is literally the embodiment of all wisdom, so it would be absurd for Him to be anti-wisdom.  The issue was that without a sign the Jews were unwilling to believe, and unless you could logic your way to the Greeks, they were also unwilling to believe.  Each of them had a predetermined set of cultural expectations under which God was expected to perform to their satisfaction in order for them to follow Him, and that’s just not how God does things.

We see evidence of this yet again in John 20 when Thomas does not believe that Jesus appeared to the other disciples unless he is literally able to touch Jesus’s wounds.  We are going to look at all of John 20:24-31 because the entire passage has some relevance to this topic.  It says:

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:24-31)

 

Jesus’s issue with Thomas wasn’t that Thomas needed a sign—it was his heart condition of unbelief that was the problem.  There is a blessing that comes for those who believe in Him without having seen a sign, but that doesn’t mean that Jesus was anti-signs.  No, it is impossible for Jesus to be anti-signs because literally the next verse we read it says “Jesus performed many other signs”.  Now, if Jesus was against his disciples having, doing, or seeing signs, would He have made sure to perform a bunch of them right after telling a disciple to stop doubting?  Absolutely not.  The issue wasn’t one of whether they could have signs or not, it was that they were Jews, and Jesus was trying to break them of the Jewish habit of having to see a sign in order to believe in a Kingdom where faith is one of the primary currencies.

If we were to read some of these passages above at face value without understanding the cultural context of Biblical Jews/Israel, we would think that seeking after signs is a bad thing, and that Jesus gets upset when we do this.  In reality, what we find is that Jesus was teaching His disciples to perform miracles, to the point that the last thing Jesus said to His disciples in Mark 16 before He ascended was this:

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.  (Mark 16:15-20)

If you were Jesus and you were against signs, wonders, and miracles, then why would the very last thing you say to your disciples include a list of the signs they should expect to see if they believe in Him?  That line of reasoning makes zero sense.  Not only does this passage show Jesus telling the disciples the signs they should expect, but when they obeyed what He commanded them it says that God confirmed their preaching with signs.  I think it is pretty safe to say that not only are signs permissible for the believer, but that it is perfectly find to seek after them.  Again, the context of not seeking after signs was for non-believing Jews who were expecting a sign in order to believe, where for Jesus’s disciples who already believed, He was teaching them how to perform miracles.  The context matters immensely.

There’s a big difference between seeking signs as a requirement to believe and seeking signs because you believe.  In the former it is based largely, I believe, in a lack of trust in God.  In the latter, it generally springs forth in context of the relationship with Him.   In other words, signs are not only not a bad thing to seek, but they’re fantastic. In 1 Corinthians 12:31 Paul told people to eagerly desire the greater spiritual gifts and repeats himself again in 1 Corinthians 14:1.  Like Jesus, Paul had no issue with there being visible manifestation of what we believe. The issue isn’t whether something should have a visible manifestation, because it should, but it’s the heart posture from whence that comes that matters most, which is why Paul devoted 1 Corinthians 13 to explaining the importance of tempering spiritual power and giftings with love.  It isn’t that love is important and that gifts are not, or that we should only seek love and naively hope the gifts will end up flowing our way.  No, we are meant to operate both in immense love and immense spiritual power as followers of Jesus, not choosing one or the other, but doing both in great measure!

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ and you want to see signs, wonders, and miracles, I encourage it!  In fact, I have written multiple books designed to help the believer walk in and experience the miraculous, some of which are also in audiobook format.

The books Gemstones From Heaven and Feathers From Heaven are about miracle manifestations, and provide biblical understanding about these miracles, wisdom for discerning the nature of the miracles and what God could be communicating through them, as well as insights into how we can partner with Heaven to experience them.

The Power of Impartation gives practical insight into how we can engage God’s heavenly system to see the supernatural enhanced in our lives and in the lives of those around us through impartation and other related spiritual laws.

Faith To Raise The Dead is a bit self-explanatory as it is about raising the dead—seeing them restored back to life and back to their families by the power of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of Life and Immortality takes that a step further to encourage us to never even taste death, as well as gives practical insights into how to begin walking that out.

The Beginner’s Guide To Traveling In The Spirit is a basic training manual to help equip the believer to engage the things of God in heavenly places, the result of which should be a greater manifestation of Heaven on the Earth.

 

 

A Resurrection Mindset: Waking the Sleeper

My very good friend Kyle died on June 19, 2021 in a motorcycle accident. The entire situation was (and is) heartbreaking, and I did pray for resurrection. At the time of writing this he hasn’t returned back to life yet, but my job is to pray, not to decide the timing of things, so pray is what I do and I let God work out the rest of the details. I have said before that in almost every situation where I step out in faith to raise the dead God teaches me something whether someone returns to life or not, and this time was no different, albeit it was harder on my emotions than most other situations.  The morning of Kyle’s funeral I had a dream that I want to share with you because it spoke to me a little differently about raising the dead than I had ever experienced before. In fact, the dream was so real that I recognize I wasn’t simply dreaming, but had a spiritual encounter with Kyle as he is now part of the Cloud of Witnesses (For those who are unfamiliar, I cover encounters with the Cloud of Witnesses in my book The Beginner’s Guide to Traveling in the Spirit). This encounter challenged me with the idea that having a resurrection mindset is really about learning to wake the sleeper, not raise the dead. I want to share with you what happened and what I have learned from it.

In the physical I was staying in Portland at a friend’s house in one of their guest rooms. I had lived with them for multiple months while we made our family move to Texas and this had been “my room” during that time, so the room itself was very familiar room to me. This matters only because in the dream encounter I began in this same room.

In the dream, I woke up laying on my bed at my friends’ house where I was physically staying the night. It was morning, and Kyle’s body was on the bed on my right, and his wife was standing at the end of the bed. I reached over and lightly nudged him to wake him up—the same way I might if I was waking someone who was sleeping. And he woke up. It was so incredibly easy—like I imagine dead raising is supposed to be, and like the Bible seems to suggest it was for Jesus.

I was overjoyed when he woke/returned, and somehow Kyle and I were now in this large building, almost like the middle of a rotunda of a massive building, complete with huge pillars. The building seemed like it was old but didn’t feel old. Standing there with Kyle next to me, I called Tyler Johnson (founder of the Dead Raising Team) on my cell to tell him that the DRT had another successful resurrection, and then Kyle and I hung out for a while. It was really nice.

And then I woke up.

It took me a minute to realize that what I had experienced before was a dream encounter. You have to understand that because in the dream I was laying in the same place on the same bed in the same room that my body actually was physically, and the dream had felt so real, it was very disorienting. And, as one can imagine, when I realized that Kyle was not in fact next to me and alive because it had been a dream encounter, I began to cry.

While there are a number of potential takeaways from this encounter, I want to focus on a key lesson I believe the Lord wanted to teach me.  The dream showed me something I suspect is meant to be a reality for us, and gives me a new target for my faith—that raising the dead should be as simple as waking someone up from sleep.  There is scriptural precedent for this concept (not that precedent is required, but it’s still there nonetheless) found in something Jesus said, as well as some things the apostle Paul mentioned:

— When Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, he mentioned that she was not dead, but rather she was sleeping. (Matthew 9:18-26; Mark 5:21-43 Luke 8:40-56)
— When Jesus spoke of Lazarus to his disciples, He initially stated that Lazarus was sleeping, but later had to clarify for them that Lazarus’s body was dead because the disciples didn’t understand (John 11:11-14)
— In Ephesians 5:14 Paul writes, “This is why it is said: ‘Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”
— Paul states in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 that those who have died are asleep, and they will wake when Christ comes again.
— In 1 Corinthians 15:6 Paul wrote about Jesus appearing to the disciples and again referred to those disciples who at the time of him writing the letter had died as being “asleep”. He goes on to reference this idea of death being sleep again in the same chapter in v18, 20, and 51 as well.

Even in the Old Testament we find this concept:
— Job speaks of death being a place where he would finally get sleep (Job 3:11-17)
— Daniel 12:2 says, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”

When we understand the our spirits are eternal and immortal, it brings clarity to some of this. When we incarnate into the earth and our spirit inhabits a body, I believe it is at that moment that something of the interaction between spirit and body births the soul and the soul realm. When someone dies, the body is clinically dead, the eternal spirit is still alive, and the soul is in an unclear state that I suggest is probably the part that is asleep—unable to function properly until it is rejoined with the body. That specific part about the soul being what sleeps is supposition, but the Bible is incredibly clear that those who die do enter some degree of sleep-like-state, and it does not expound in-depth on what that looks like or what portion of the human being enters that sleep-state, so educated guesses are what we are left with.

Now, where this matters for us is that if we are praying to raise someone from the dead then on some level we need to change our view of death from being this massive mountain we have to overcome, and instead simply acknowledge that the person has entered a transitional state of “sleep”—and it is our job to go wake them. I don’t pretend to have it all worked out as far as what that looks like, but I do believe that God was showing me something of importance during this dream encounter. What difference in results would we see if we learn to shift our mindset from seeing death as a mountain to climb and instead we view it as a defeated foe who can at very best put someone to sleep for a bit. And if all death can do is put someone to sleep, then all we have to do is wake them back up and we’ve solved the problem. 1 Corinthians 15:25-27a says of Jesus, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he ‘has put everything under his feet.’” Jesus is the head, we are the Body (1 Cor 12:27, Eph 5:23, 29), and as such if we put everything under His feet then we, the Body of Christ, are all collectively taking dominion over it and placing it under our feet as well.

According to Hebrews 6:2, raising the dead is a foundational teaching of the faith, so I believe it is important we not only have a clear theology on what this looks like, but also practical application—a way to actually “do the stuff” and not just talk about it. To that end, I have written a book series called the Abundant Life series, of which the first book is Faith to Raise the Dead. This book is a shortcut—and that is precisely the point. This doesn’t have to be hard for everyone, and my goal in writing it is to make this a far easier journey for you than it has been for me. Faith to Raise the Dead will give the reader a great deal of wisdom and insight on raising the dead. It lays out what the Bible says on the subject, and answers many common questions and concerns. In some places I share a few perspectives and/or thought processes for the reader to consider on matters that don’t have one clear and specific biblical answer, but even things that don’t have clear-cut answers are discussed. At the end of the book there is also a list of scriptures that one can reference to encourage their faith and, if someone prefers to pray the scriptures when praying, that appendix can be used for that as well. The goal was to write a comprehensive book that prepares the reader to go out and raise the dead—and I believe I accomplished that. I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book today. While my friend Kyle has not yet returned, I believe that with the resources this book holds, the future can be different for another family—and maybe you will be the next one to give someone back to their family, brought back to life by the power of Jesus Christ.

 

Additional Resources:

Faith to Raise the Dead by Michael King

Practical Keys to Raise the Dead by Michael King (excerpts from FTRTD, can be read in about 30 minutes)

How to Raise the Dead by Tyler Johnson

The Dead Are Raised: Unearthing Lost Resurrection Stories by Tyler Johnson

Saints Who Raised The Dead: True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles by Father Albert Hebert

The Dead Raising Team

 

 

Rewrite The Stars – A Different Governance

I was out late with a friend one evening before my move to Ohio.  We went to a sort of Portland-y food-fusion restaurant and had dinner and these margarita-like wine-slushy drinks that, for someone like me who doesn’t really enjoy wine, actually tasted pretty good.  We talked about a wide range of things, but during the conversation we ended up talking about the movie The Greatest Showman, and she mentioned that she really loved the song “A Million Dreams“.  Having not seen the movie, I wasn’t sure if I knew the song (but it turns out later in listening to it that I actually did recognize it, and the song is absolute fire).  As conversations go, this ended up sliding us sideways into talking about other songs from the movie, and I began telling her about how I really love the song “Rewrite the Stars“, and what the Lord began speaking to my heart the first time I heard it.  I wrote a bit about this in my recent article titled “A New Energy System“, discussing how we are meant not to be governed by the sun, moon, and stars (and other celestial bodies) but rather to govern over them, and in talking about the song with my friend, it made me think of some things I hadn’t shared in that article.  I want to take a look at them here.

If you want to listen to the song you can catch it here

Having not seen the movie I’m not overly familiar with the plot, but from the little I gather there appears to be a bit of a Romeo-and-Juliet-style star-crossed-lovers scenario, which leads to the scene where this song gets sung.  I’m not sharing the entire song here, but the lyrics that stood out to me and how this song communicates part of what I was saying in that blog.

“You claim it’s not in the cards
And fate is pulling you miles away
And out of reach from me
But you’re here in my heart
So who can stop me if I decide that you’re my destiny?

What if we rewrite the stars?
Say you were made to be mine
Nothing could keep us apart
You’d be the one I was meant to find
It’s up to you, and it’s up to me
No one can say what we get to be
So why don’t we rewrite the stars?
Maybe the world could be ours, tonight

. . . . . . .

How do we rewrite the stars?
Say you were made to be mine
Nothing can keep us apart
‘Cause you are the one I was meant to find
It’s up to you, and it’s up to me
No one can say what we get to be
Why don’t we rewrite the stars?
Changing the world to be ours . . .”

 

The song is all about how our destiny is guided and determined by the stars, which is a reference to astrology and astrological determinings, in that the positions of the stars and the messages found in those things are what will determine our path in life.  The first line is a reference to Tarot, with the idea that one’s fate and destiny is tied to what casting cards through divination magic will reveal to us about our future, and as it continues it mentions how fate is keeping the two apart.  Whether through astrology, tarot, or other magical systems, the concept is that fate is this mystical force of pre-determination that has already decided what will and will not occur in our lives.  We could liken it a bit to God preparing good works in advance for us to do, but the difference is that fate is an impartial force whereas our heavenly Father makes plans and then walks them out with us relationally, not stooping to the method of control and removal of free will that fate employs.  Which is part of why I like these lyrics so much.  Astrology, divination, and related oracular arts are all about tying us into determined futures and linking our power and authority and our bloodlines into the future that the fallen angels want to create, and the fact is they cannot do that without our assistance, which is why some of these practices are so imperative for them to seduce people into.

On the other hand, our Heavenly Father has given us power and authority over all of these things, and we get to partner with Him to walk out a much higher calling.  So as the song says, “what if we rewrite the stars?”  The one character seemed to understand that “no one can say what we get to be.”  The demonic and their divinatory practices do not get to overwrite, override, or control our path as followers of Jesus, nor should the celestial bodies, as we are meant to govern over them, not be ruled by them.

The song goes on to ask the question “How do we rewrite the stars?”  And isn’t that what we as believers need to understand?  How do we as followers of Jesus, ones who have been raised up to rule and reign with Him, remove ourselves from under the reign of creation and learn to govern over it?  How do we rewrite the stars?  How do we change the means by which we function in the cosmos, no longer being bound by their mandates and decrees?  I don’t have the answers to all of this, but I do believe that it begins within us.  In my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality I talk about the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the body, and how we first engage the transfiguration of our bodies as the firstfruits, and then from there we will see all creation become transfigured as we, the sons and daughters of the Most High release it from its bondage to decay and death.  I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book, and if you are interested in this subject you can also check out my friend Fiorella Giordano’s course on the New Creation Continuum which discusses related matters.  Be blessed!

The Angel with the Wing Tattoos

The daughter of one of my patients shared a story with me about a previous visit their family had at the hospital I work at.  Everything I share in this story is what she personally told me:

 

They had been in the hospital at that time for a few weeks when they had been expecting to stay only for a few days.  Her mother had been very sick and was so sick, in fact, that she was near death and began talking to her dead relatives as though they were close at hand (which, if you understand that we are surrounded by the Cloud of Witnesses, she most likely was close to death and was talking to her deceased family.)

She was given a room in the ICU, so a nurse came to move this patient to the new room.  The person who came to the room to move her was a tall blond male nurse with piercing blue eyes with beautiful tattoos of wings on each of his arms.  When he came into the room he told them, “You are safe now because I’m here to take care of you.”  This nurse took them to the ICU, got her tucked in bed, gave her medications, and told both the patient and her daughter to rest.

They were undisturbed for six hours overnight and got amazing sleep, then woke up the next morning, the patient went to a surgical procedure, and had recovered so well that she discharged from the hospital the next day.

When the daughter talked to staff about the  nurse they had that night, she was very thankful for his care and wanted to know who it was—but the hospital had to record of this employee and none of the staff recognized any ICU nurse matching that description.  Because she had been given medications, had vital signs taken, etc., all of that should be recorded electronically on the Electronic Health Record, so they decided to speak with Medical Records to get a copy of their records for that hospital stay.  Per the daughter, this “employee” did not appear anywhere in the medical records as well—as if this nurse who worked with them overnight basically didn’t exist!

 

The daughter was excited when she told me this story, and she told me it was the reason they came back to the hospital when I met them—because they knew beyond a shadow of doubt that angels were actively at work in the building and it gave them a feeling of security knowing that God was taking care of them.

The Bible tells us in Hebrews 13:2, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”  There is something about how angels function that, at times, they will manifest in bodily form appearing as humans, and we can interact with them without knowing we are talking to angels.  I firmly believe this is exactly what happened in this encounter they had!

To add some details to consider, any time someone transfers from one unit to another in this hospital, there is a process.  The bed on the new unit has to be assigned and someone has to transfer them in the computer once they arrive—which means someone has to either tell the person to transfer them in the computer, or do it themselves.  This means the angel would have either had to do the electronic transfer himself or tell someone else to—someone who later clearly didn’t remember that conversation with that being.  When a patient transfers units, the offgoing nurse gives a report to the oncoming nurse, so someone would have had to tell the angel something about the patient they were coming to pick up, and if they didn’t do that, the offgoing nurse would have followed up at some point to ensure that report was given if for no other reason than it is a legal obligation nurses have when transferring care.  All documentation in the computer would require some kind of login, and somehow every nurse on the unit would have to have believed that some other nurse was the one caring for that patient including the Charge Nurse who is the one responsible for making staff assignments.  Furthermore, if the Charge RN didn’t initially notice that overnight the patient had no nurse assigned, they would certainly have noticed when it came time to make assignments for the day shift staff.

All of these details and more make this story just that much more profound when we consider all of the big and little details that God had to work out in order to send an angel to take care of his beloved daughter and to ensure she recovered and was able to return to her normal life.  In the same way that God went out of His way for her, God cares about all of the big and little things in all of our lives, and when we pray and ask Him to intervene, we can trust that He will.  Whether it will always be as dramatic as this encounter or not, we have a Heavenly Father who is trustworthy—and who knows!  Maybe someday you will be telling me a story of an angelic encounter you had as well!

Renewing the Vows with a Miracle Ring

At the end of last year I was at a Love After Marriage seminar/workshop to work on my marriage.  While that doesn’t sound like great news, the truth is that from time to time in marriages we all run into problems—whether expected ones, unexpected ones, or ongoing persistent ones we just aren’t sure how to fix or get past.  Sometimes newlyweds go to one simply so they can get a head start on having a healthy marriage, which is a great plan too.  The workshop this weekend was pretty awesome, and God did a lot of really stunning things for everyone present.  And while I could probably share so many different little things that God did, oneof a few stories in particular stuck out to me which I will share here.

After working through a lot of difficulty and getting major breakthrough through the course of the 3.5 day workshop, one couple decided to renew their wedding vows.  Prior to this weekend they had been divorced once, remarried each other, and were heading down the same path of this-isn’t-working all over again.  But God did something spectacular.

The ministry couple leading the event had them come up on stage (there were about 40 people present in total) to renew their vows, and even had a few audience members stand in as “best man” and “matron of honor”—but there was one small hiccup in the process.  The wife didn’t have her wedding ring on and for whatever reason couldn’t find it.  Oops.

But God.

The moment I heard her say “I don’t have a ring,” I suddenly knew I had the solution.  I was wearing a simple metal ring with an ornamental design on it that was either a leaf or a feather depending on what the viewer thinks it is.  I bought the ring a number of years prior and the moment I heard her say she needed a ring, I knew in my spirit that this one would fit her.  I brought it up front, she tried it on, and it fit perfectly.  During the short but very-cool ceremony (thrown together in under 5 actual minutes of time), a few people prophesied over the couple, so I decided to come up and explain the significance of the ring.

I had bought it an unknown number of years ago as a reminder to pray for miracles—and specifically miracles such as those that I write about in some of my books—gemstones, feathers, and one in particular I have been asking the Lord for, the manifestation of leaves from the Tree of Life.  To me, this ring fitting her and being part of this moment of restoration signified that God was not only doing a miracle-work in their marriage, but that He was releasing a new measure of His life into it as well.  I felt blessed that something so seemingly simple, giving someone a ring, could have so many levels of significance, and all of it was prepared in advance by our Heavenly Dad who cares so much more about us and our needs than we have any concept.  He prepared the right ring years in advance so at the right time and in the right place it would fill its designated purpose—to help a couple enjoy the renewal of the lifelong work that He plans to do in and through them.

miracle ring

The brief ceremony was really special, and it was evident that God had done a work in both of their hearts to reconnect, reignite, and reinstate what the enemy had meant for their destruction.  God is so kind, and so good!

 

If you are having marriage struggles, just want deeper intimacy with your spouse, or want to develop a healthier family culture, I can’t recommend Love After Marriage enough.  Run by Nothing Hidden Ministries, they are all about helping people build the healthy, godly families God has planned for us.  Whether dealing with problems, learning practical tools to bring the Holy Spirit into the midst of any conflicts, heal past hurts, or develop healthier relationships, this ministry has seen it all and God has used them to heal and restore hurting and broken families around the world.  You don’t have to have earth-shattering problems (although they can help those too)—you just have to want to have a better marriage than you do right now, and God will show up and meet you.  If you are married I encourage you to follow the link and sign up for a Workshop today (they have Single Life workshops as well!).  Click to visit Nothing Hidden Ministries.

 

Finding Gold in the Dust

One of the things we did in Peru 2023 was to hold medical clinics.  In fact, one of the things Overseas Missions has done on many of their trips is to hold medical clinics as an outreach method.  We give people actual medical treatment to the extent we can, then we send everyone to our prayer team to get prayer, and, no exaggeration, almost everyone walks away healed.  As the saying goes, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.  Taking time to meet people’s practical physical needs goes a long way to show that we care about people, which then creates an opportunity to minister God’s love to them.  For us, this isn’t just notches in a belt where we can pat ourselves on the back and feel we “accomplished something for God.”  In fact, this approach is one of the things I love about how Overseas Missions does things because it really is all about people and sharing God’s heart for them, not about being able to show a church group nice pictures after the fact to get more funding.  It’s all about finding the gold in the dust—and God demonstrated that to me during our clinics in a unique manner.

As a nurse, I am quite happy to use my existing skills and training to help create ministry opportunities.  Even if we didn’t do clinics I’d still go on these trips, but this is one way I can give back that not everyone is able to, and as an outreach method there is little that compares to it.  I remember in 2018 I was in India on a similar trip and because we were doing these clinics we were visited by hundreds of locals who otherwise would have passed by but never stopped for prayer.  After all, most residents of India believe in gods of some kind, so unless we do something unique they don’t really know why they should care about our God as compared to the ones they already follow.  One woman from that trip even told a team member, “You have loved me more than my gods ever have.”  That’s the God-kind of love and that’s what these trips are about. Now, back to the clinics.

Little about these clinics is glamorous.  We have bags full of medicine and vitamins, some reference books, an extremely limited number of resources with which to assess patients, and we have our eyes, hands, and stethoscopes.  We sit on plastic chairs, have our medicines laid out on dusty wooden tables and benches, and people make lines in literal dirt and dust to be seen.  And yet, time and time again, every time I would look at people’s skin for rashes, parasites, fungal infections, or any other gnarly thing they needed help with, their skin always had gold dust all over it.

Every.

Single.

Time.

 

It was ridiculous.

 

This is how amazing God is and how He does things far differently than we do.  God’s economy is not man’s economy.

Now, I didn’t check everyone’s skin, but for those I did, in the trash-filled, slummy, muddy, poor, dusty, dirty, overlooked area of Belen, Iquitos that we visited, all of them God had covered with His golden glory.  It was really obvious too.  The first one I saw was on a man who had this odd rash around his neck and shoulder area.  He wasn’t the kind of guy who uses sparkly makeup and skin lotion either—he was a dude who lived in a poor area and wasn’t about to waste money on that kind of stuff, and certainly he wouldn’t use it as a treatment for a skin rash.  It surprised me so much that I had the other nurse and our translator look at it as well.  But it didn’t stop there, or with him.  A kid with Ringworm?  It was a kid with ringworm covered in a thin layer of gold dust.  Unidentified rashes?  They were unidentified and yet covered in a light dusting of golden glory.

The one that surprised me the most, and I tell this story in detail in this article, was the woman who had a tumor on her ankle, and the intensity of the gold dust on her tumor-covered ankle was the most of anyone I had seen the entire time we were there.

I will be meditating on this in the future to truly understand what God was saying and doing here because I don’t think I truly have grasped the depths of what He wants to show me in this particular way He manifested His presence.  And I don’t say this because the gold dust miracle is new to me, because it isn’t.  I will eventually publish, possibly even later this year, a book called Gold from Heaven that will discuss this miracle.  But there is something specific and unique about this time and place that God chose to do it and I hope to gain better understanding of it.  But for whatever the reason that God decided to show His glory off in this manner it was spectacular.

You see, I love this miracle, but I wasn’t asking for it.  We had been praying for the sick and the injured to be healed all week long, not for gold dust to appear on their blemished skin.  He WAS been healing almost everyone we prayed for, but this both delighted me and caught me off-guard because it seemed so pointless and was so beautiful all at the same time.  Like I said before, God’s economy isn’t man’s economy and the way He does things is so different than our methods.  We are always looking for some specific way that the miracle is going to “preach the gospel” and if we can’t point to how it gets people to say a sinner’s prayer or get miraculously healed or some such thing then we tend to reason that it can’t be God or that He must be confused somehow because we have ideas of what God really cares about and none of these unique miracles make the list.  But God is interested in removing our limitation thinking, not operating inside of it just to keep us happy.  Furthermore, God isn’t limited to either healing the sick or manifesting gold dust as detractors tend to think.  No, the Creator of the entire cosmos who spoke creation into being with a single word is more than capable of doing both and tons more at the same time.

I was excited to see what God did at these clinics, through all of the Peru 2023 trip, and what He will continue to do in the future.  He is continuing to teach us new things and transform our ideas of who He is and what He is like,  I firmly believe that we must learn to experience His opulence in these kinds of ways, whether things like finding gold in the dust of poor slums that far outshine our idea of extravagance or in other ways that He chooses to reveal His goodness, there is one thing that is certain in all of this.  Jesus is alive and He will stop at nothing to display His love and goodness to all of us!

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