September 2021 Monthly Summary

This month, the majority of my energy was shared between two different areas: in support of my city and in supporting my students to adjust to the new school year.

An Energetic Return

Ministry at Work

As the school year has inched towards normalcy, I’ve noticed increasing levels of favor with students in other grades, with students’ parents, amongst others in my school district reaching out for help, and with other colleagues. Beyond the students I met teaching aftercare as a substitute who consistently ask when I’m coming back, I have one first grader who likes to visit me and send me heart-melting air hugs at dismissal. According to his teacher, he regularly says that I am his favorite teacher. It must be the Holy Spirit, I’ve only seen him in passing and his joy is a blessing.

I have been so grateful to begin developing a friendship with my new co-teacher. She is an experienced professional who is also tremendously kind and creative. I can honestly say that this is the first time in my 6 years of teaching that I have been able to work this closely with someone else on my team with such a high degree of mutual support and agreement.

I am excited to start a tradition of praying for students’ on Mondays with my co-teacher. While I have used discernment, seeing in the spirit, and strategic prayer independently since I’ve been at this school AND have even been able to invite colleagues to do so before difficult meetings in the past, this is the first time I’ve had consistent support. As might be predicted, I have a list of several students that we’ll be praying for tomorrow with the specific difficulties they’ve had lately and bible verses that will allow us to pray into the root.

Increasing Ministry to DC

A shocking 95% of my seeing in the spirit this month had to do with God inviting me into greater personal responsibility for DC as the place where I live. While this is far from my first time interceding for the city, God has stressed to me the importance of gathering a support group of people not just called to the gift of prophecy, but the office of a Prophet. As God surrounds me with others who have a similar orientation, my prayer is that we will be able to do biweekly prayer calls, prayer walks, and build friendships to combat the difficulty of the city’s spiritual terrain.

For that reason, I have been more intentional to invest in local friendships with others also called to supernatural ministry this month. With a friend, I was able to walk and pray over the Capitol building in DC before protestors arrived on September 18th, including the side of the building that insurrectionists had breached last January. We also prayed over the Supreme Court building for similar reasons.

I was also invited by another friend to accompany her in her street ministry with the homeless around Union Station. I hope to be able to be able to partner more intentionally with her in the future, to supplement the incredible relationships she’s built with tools like seeing in the Spirit. Lately, my seeing in the Spirit has become more fluent, which has been a joy and an adventure.

This month, I have needed to not just track my dreams or independent seeing in the spirit, but start to track signs and shared seeing in the spirit with friends. This month, one of my close friends and I have been able to build on each others’ images and get different aspects of the same phenomena as we pray. As the visionary side of the prophetic becomes more and more fluent, I hope to be increasingly aligned with the Holy Spirit in all aspects of my life.

Favorite Book this Month

A well timed book can be such a blessing! This month, I’ve been reading on prophecy in the first and second century after Christ. Specifically, this book examined differences in prophecy among early Christians, pagans, and Greco-Romans. Throughout the book, the author describes various methods that pagans, Greeks, Jews, and Romans in these cultures would use to seek the divine. This list isn’t exhaustive, but includes: Amulets, spells, horoscopes, physiognomy, incubation, alchemy, augury, consulting entrails, lots, dice, mirrors, oracles, prodigies, palms, sieves, forms, figures, palms, dishes, lightning and thunder, and the most hilarious of of all, cheese.

This book also describes how Christians in the first and second centuries approached non-Christian prophecy in method and interpretation. Regarding methodology, there were various Early Christian prophets who did not initiate encounters but were led by the Holy Spirit and whose words were confirmed by scripture. Related to interpretation, Irenaus, an early church father declares, “Heretics think that the scriptures are ambiguous and that one needs to use outside information to interpret them”. Irenaeus (like many modern prophets) believed that the prophecies in scriptures self-interpret one another, without any need to add to the word of God (Rev 22:18). The book describes times where Early Christians took an apologetic, conciliary approach by appealing to their audience’s background in pagan prophecies to show how even these prophecies pointed to Jesus. There are also examples of times when Early Christians took a polemic approach, specifically condemning divination and contrasted it with Holy Spirit led prophecy and methods. In reading this book, it’s easy to understand how many pagan, Jewish, Greek, or Roman individuals would have understood Jesus to be a prophet based on their traditions, but would have needed the revelation of the Holy Spirit to know him as Messiah. It puts new context on verses like Matt 16: 13-20, John 1, 2 Timothy 4:3, Acts 16:16, Leviticus 19:26, Leviticus 20:6, Revelation 22:15, Revelation 21:8.

Finally, this book highlights several cultural phenomena whose history should give us greater fear of the Lord. First, the book highlights the Roman empire’s dependence on prophecy and ambivalent fear towards and dependence upon nationalistic prophecies. Secondly, the book highlights the thematic transition in early rabbinic Judaism between waiting for a messiah to instead focusing only on the teachings of Moses through Pseudepigrapha and ethically following the law. It is important to note that as these these individuals reformed their tradition to no longer prophetically anticipate the Messiah, the Second Temple was destroyed (Jesus foretells this destruction as part of the religious leaders’ rejection of him in Mark 13).

You can find more about the book here: https://www.amazon.com/…/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title…

Prayer Requests

Please pray:

• That God would draw to me locals who are called to the prophetic
• That my students’ would taste and see the glory of God
• That God would continue equipping me to stand in the face of increasing spiritual warfare
• That we will all share in the joy of the Lord as captives are set free

Until later,

Haley