March 2023 Monthly Summary

After a turbulent February, in March, God removed nearly every source of toxic stress from my work, home, and ministry. For probably the first time in my life, I am free just to enjoy the season. I’m quietly in awe, wondering what all God will produce in my life now that I don’t have to live under as much pressure. He is further boundarying this season as a time of joy, safe pasture, favor with people, filling in necessary skill sets without pressure, and holistic recompense. With significant amounts of joy at work and deep but manageably-paced ministry, I’m guarding my time so that I can continue to receive. Based on dreams, the choice to wait on the Lord and receive will have the effect of adding a layer of quality, luxury, and abundance to whatever I produce later on.

Structure Changes to these Monthly Summaries

As God keeps working out his Reformation in and through the Church, the changes he’s making in me call for structural changes in the nature of my writing and monthly summaries. In this post, I will explicitly flag those structure changes as they come up.

The first change is that I’ve chosen to remove my “goals” section from the beginning of monthly summary posts, which I included in November, December, January, and February because it was part of a greater process of internal stabilization and acclimation to Seattle as a city. While I am still focusing on Quality of Life, Community, Expanding Skill Sets, Holding Salt, and Developing Resources as seasonal goals, I feel that God is organically outworking them in various areas of my life. Essentially, I can afford to put less focus on it.

Photos in March: Adventure Days in Seattle

I often start my monthly summaries with pictures, and I will do the same going forward. However, this month, I felt the need to further separate the pictures by theme. I will take of the tag “Photos in [Month]” for April’s monthly summary, but felt it was necessary to illustrate the change right now.

Photos in March: Lots of Cooking and Eating

The majority of the meaningful photos I took this month were related to food, since being nourished by God is such a theme of the season. This month, I spent so much time in the kitchen, preparing things with God. In March, I learned how to make Spanish squid ink paella, Italian mushroom risotto, fried and braised Filipino chicken adobo, roasted vegetable broth for soups, and many Brazilian-style fresh pressed juices. In peace, I learned both how to elevate simple things and simplify elaborate things.

Food has been a big part of my recent adventures with God and family. An archetype moment from this month was getting dramatically lost on the bus on the way to Church, deciding to ask for help, waiting, getting rescued by my mom in her car, and then going for tamales after. Getting into a tentative rhythm of doing approximately biweekly Sunday afternoon meals at my mom’s house has been a similar part of that process.

Simple Pleasures

Since I’m no longer in a season of traveling and transition, I’m bringing back my “Simple Pleasures” monthly summary section in order to celebrate my favorite things God has done.

Daily

• Staring at the stars and drinking tea on the porch after coming home, wave upon wave of fresh hyacinth fragrance
• Getting free bubble tea, chocolate mousse eggs, and fancy fruit from various places. Having extras to share with my friends and housemates!
• Seeing how much gold God has put in young but anointed people in my church. Watching Christ’s light emerge from how they lead without needing them to be perfect.
• Having time for slow mornings, processing, and solitude. Going to evening church service instead of the morning options because it’s so peaceful, simple, and pure.
• Sunbathing in the park with a book
• The relatable dynamic between the hummingbird family that lives within our weeping cherry tree
• Sharing wine with housemates, reluctantly but eventually analyzing reality TV as a series of case studies on human nature
• Continuing to learn Italian, becoming more kin to the rhythm of the language
• Playing and making up rules for nonsense games with coworkers, using things like mops, brooms, and baskets, with the hope of spinning a giant wheel for prizes. My boss has designed a full-scale Easter Egg Hunt for our staff this coming week, and I’m so excited that I’ve been eagerly hunting Easter eggs in my dreams. 😜
• Getting a full body workout through lifting boxes, walking, living up multiple flights of stairs, and carrying groceries
• Finishing building IKEA furniture, and unpacking the little green suitcase of my life’s trinkets and collections. Nesting and grouping objects by nation.

“Aha” Moments

I’m adding this section of “Aha Moments” to document significant realizations from this month. Independently, these are the ideas that I tend to spend the most time nurturing and have the capacity to grow from seeds into stories.

• Co-partnership with God through My Thesis Realizing that God has designed my thesis as a net that will gather testimonies of what God is going in the United States and the globe in the next 18 months. Earlier, I received the blueprint for how to form my thesis, and at least some of God’s desire for how it would help provide an onramp for Contemplatives and Charismatics to receive from each other and the Holy Spirit in the next 200 years. However, I am only seeing now how God is going to back my thesis and externally facilitate events. The entire thing will be a curation of testimonies of Jesus, including testimonies from encounters that have yet to happen yet but will soon.
• Threads of Hidden Preparation coming Together Realizing on a deeper level through a Zoom call that all the experiences I’ve had with adults in different cultures and communities were the preparation to serve their youth effectively. Seeing threads come more tangibly together.
• Opportunities to Receive Turning the process of receiving what I need from God into a game. Every morning as I leave the house, telling God, “Today I’m giving you an opportunity to help me receive”. Coming back home (more often than not) with gifts far beyond just the things I needed. Recently, I’ve been getting so used to having an abundance of resources that I’ve stopped asking for things, but people. While I have plenty of people in my life through friendships, church, work, and housemates, so long as I can determine the amount of time I spend on others according to my own terms, I never get tired of collecting more.
  • When I asked God to send me more people, he arranged for a friend I met through my Church’s Youth ministry to encounter me at work. She gave me a schedule update that I wouldn’t have otherwise. On the same day, he sent me a young woman who happens to be discerning whether to apply to my current seminary, and made plans to connect. That day I continued to come home with free things, but the people element was especially wonderful. Since I’m starting to internalize abundance, I will just keep delighting in receiving more people.

• Freedom from Mischaracterization: Who Gets to Write the Story? This month, I spent a lot of time considering how seeing our lives as living stories can be a source of freedom from the fear of mischaracterization. When a person becomes a character in a story, their narrative becomes open for public debate. As an audience, readers cast all their insecurities, aspirations, and desires onto the characters’ lives, relating to them in some ways, and rejecting them in others. Personally, I love my privacy. I’d be content leading a mostly private life. But as God drags me further into leadership and the potential of greater exposure, I have to understand that it is inevitable that my story will be misappropriated. The desire to speak with my own voice and use my own words drove me into journaling at 9 years old, and will continue to motivate my writing. But I can’t change the fact that people will stand at the margins, judging from a convenient distance, assuming that they know my story or widely share their opinions. The people who know the truest version of events and people are not usually the ones who stand far off, but the ones who are very close, which is why historians love to interview eye-witnesses. It’s not up to me to broadcast a story that is free of limitations or challenges, a version that everyone can get on board with. It’s up to me to remain as innocent as I know how to be before God and give Heaven something to be proud of, through the story I embody and what stays alive in ink. Getting free from the fear of mischaracterization isn’t achieved by more grit, it’s achieved by greater freedom (surrender). Let people think what they want to think. Furthermore, God’s recompense for frequent mischaracterization isn’t in public vindication, but in being more fully known by him and the people who really love you.

Figuring out My Function

As I had more time to rest, God reframed how I should relate to specific gifts he’s given me. He provided clarity about how each gift is meant to be used and shook off word curses that others’ had released over these gifts.

I Definitely am Dramatic

While former friends may laugh to know that I am only just now figuring this out, I finally can see what my mother meant during all the years she called me “dramatic”.

In my defense, knowing how to be dramatic in the best way has only really grown through the freedom that God has given me over the past few months at work. The atmosphere is so healthy, low-pressure, and free that I’m able to utilize the same silly nonsense that I have used to connect with young students to relate to grown-ups. It’s the same silly goofiness that outside of the classroom, I only used to share with friends who had invested in my life for many years. This tends to look like using charm or carefully composed, dramatic pauses when delivering a message to turn most things into a joke. It looks like telling absurd or benignly-irreverent stories to customers, and childlikeness with staff. Now that I’m under less pressure, absurdity often rises to the surface, and who am I to stop it?

This process of learning how to lean into being silly has taken a long time. I’m remembering times in early elementary school when I used the same drama and charm to avoid learning how to tie my shoes, but would flatly refuse to dance to certain music because it felt humiliating. To be fair, I’m pretty sure that during that stage of my life, not-tying my shoes was more about receiving nurture, mixed with irritation at the complexity of the process and reluctance about the necessity of learning a new skill. As an adult, I was happy to dance to similar humiliating music in the classroom because it gave joy to my students, but for my own sake, I still feel like a drowned cat when I’m forced into singing karaoke or similar things.

It’s taken a while to recognize that humor which has been part of my family for years is actually one of the most powerful tools I have to connect with people. Though I’ve watched my dad’s self-deprecatory humor and clowning for years, his use of humor always felt forced or transactional. I prefer only authentic silly nonsense, not performance. When it’s done right, humor should be less dark, more childlike, and purer: just nonsense for the sake of nonsense without even a glimmer of manipulation. When I lived in D.C., I was aware that I needed to learn how to be more myself with a greater amount of people. As it turns out, the only way for that capacity to have been restored is by removing every source of pressure and having a more peaceful life. Figuring out how to use that same charm and humor to connect with other people in a way that feels emotionally safe has been a tremendous source of joy.

Receiving Blueprints and Prophetic Teaching comes from Sensing Emotions

In this season, due to being aligned to the grace that is on Seattle as a city, the majority of the prophetic words I give others fall into two categories: words releasing the emotions of God for a situation and words related to strategic blueprints and building.

Yet, it’s taken me a little longer to understand how my gift of sensing is really at work behind both of these. Within Western culture, we often tend to assume that logic and emotions are separate. For me, that cultural barrier has prevented me from explaining most accurately how I function in prophecy.

When I get a blueprint, it normally always starts by sensing an emotion based on a need I notice or a common trend. I press into the feeling first, then clear pictures or specific words generally follow. I end up with detailed notes and plans, but then often do not know who they are for (ie, which group is meant to take them on) until I do some exploration. For example, in January, I sensed a strategy to develop national prophetic words, polled a group of friends for interest, and then only found the right setting after speaking to a leader who was recently given a desire by God for a similar national prophecy in her group. The partnership has borne fruit so far because we both brought our portion to the table, in capacity, interest, and gifting.

I know that the teaching is prophetic and from God because it is spontaneous, very rarely related to topics that I naturally know much about, and easily forgotten. Some of it is stuff that I have yet to learn, and depending on the topic, I write it down as I release it when it relates to areas that I need to pursue further. It reminds me of times when I’ve given prophetic words about people’s seasons, callings, or functions and promptly forgotten the word when I’ve walked away, but remembered the person’s heart or reaction. I know that the gift of prophetic teaching is limited when I feel a sense of obligation instead of that stirring, or when people are clinging to me instead of seeking clarity from God. Similar to the grace that is on other 1 Corinthians 12 “gifts of the spirit” (like healing), it usually only comes in proportion to people’s earnestness.

Prophetic Teaching

In the same way, when someone asks a really savory question about God or the prophetic, when I wait on the Lord, I often get a sense of internal stirring. The more I press into the emotional tenor, the specific flavor/color/texture of the person’s curosity, the more the description flows out of my mouth or out of my fingers (written or spoken Nabi flow) as I try to distill the emotion into words. It nearly always sounds highly strategic and often does turn out to be accurate. But! The clarity and the polish is always a result of the process of distilling emotions. Since God I has used so many cultures that value emotional integration to form me, it isn’t surprising that my function as a prophet is based in emotions and sensing.

Memory

To be fair, God’s design for me has probably always been based in emotions. One way I see evidence of this is through my memory. Similar to how I remember landmarks and not street names, my memory isn’t memorized by events, but by people and strong emotions. I create systems of spreadsheets and documenting dreams and events to compensate for the fact that on my own, I would hardly remember anything. Generally speaking, after I have answered a question with prophetic teaching or given a word of blueprints/strategy, I nearly always forget. I will usually remember the texture of someone’s personality, preferences, and family details because I enjoy people. Because I have such an affinity for words, I have learned that I generally remember names only after I have been able to visualize the spelling or write it out multiple times.

Word of Knowledge for Inner Healing comes from Sensing

This past month, I had an experience that God used to show me how this capacity for sensing is meant to help in ministering to people’s emotions. I was at an event related to international missions, and as I sat down to the person next to me, I sensed overwhelming fear that did not belong to me. As I pressed into the texture of that emotion, the fear was about being sent abroad to the missions field, lack of provision, and fear over surrendering control over career more comprehensively. Later in the day God provided a cozy setting for me to speak to that person, and as it turned out, it was their fear. I was able to look them in the eye and speak strengthening to their heart, and impartation of being able to trust God, and releasing grace to experience the peace of God in the unknown. There were a few points I needed to challenge them on, but it was framed mostly from the perspective of experientially knowing who God is as Provider. The feedback from this person was generally positive, and helped me understand how to use my senses in the future. For this individual, anxiety was a barrier that was keeping them from experiencing the fullness of God’s love for them. Only by returning to the love of God can we find the clarity that is waiting there.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

1 John 4:18

And yet, God did even greater things in my sensing this past month. He redeemed and reframed early experiences of trauma in my life as a strength for ministry! The methods may not have been my favorite, but I was impressed by God’s decision to use it. Essentially, there was a moment earlier this month where God was calling me to sense demonic strongholds over a group. He sent the beginnings of what felt like a panic attack as emotions that felt much more intense than my own. The emotion felt like a need to escape, hide, and lack of being able to breathe. The experience allowed me to identify several principalities that I probably wouldn’t have been able to sense on my own. It reminds me of times where God gives ministers phantom pains so that they will be able to call in physical healing, but as related to releasing (or standing in the gap for) Mass Inner Healing to a group of people. Later on in my ministry, I get the sense that God will use this gift to help me discern and respond to the emotions of children or vulnerable people who are not able to articulate for themselves the help that they need. While I’m not thrilled about having to bear the emotional discomfort of these experiences, if these experiences are the “canary in the coal mine” that helps get vulnerable people get to freedom, so be it.

Identity

God has been providing conditions to have deep conversations with coworkers about the gospel without me really changing anything. For example, one of my coworkers loves to talk about the ethics of Jesus. I indulge him as a way to remind him of his early life experiences in the Church before he began to rely on his own understanding.

This coworker asked me very nonchalantly, “What is your favorite bible verse?” And as Jeremiah 29:13 came spilling out of my mouth, I realized that God’s design for me was always probably more focused on emotions and sensing than I consciously realized.

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

Jeremiah 29:13

As I kept exploring the heart this month, I needed to rewrite my Identity statement. I became irritated at how cerebral the earlier version was, and there was fresh grace to write a clearer version. In this draft, I simplified some language, added structural elements to make visible the themes God has been working out in my life, added more context and missing pieces of my timeline, more family information, and reframed experiences in order to connect more thoroughly with people. Since it’s a living document that I’ve already revised many times, I’m sure this rewrite won’t be the last.

Two Kinds: Symbolic Dreams and Word of Knowledge Dreams

In another conversation this month, I finally found the words to describe a kind of dream that I often get through another Prophet who gets similar revelation. In the conversation, she described dreams that carry a very pure quality, where God reveals specific words of knowledge that she needs to know for ministry. This could have to do with the connections between people, specific timings of events, and other information. As I listened to her, I realized that I’m not alone in getting this kind of revelation.

As it stands, I generally get multiple dreams per night when I am fit and physically well-rested. I wake up multiple times in the night to jot down dreams semi-lucid, and return to sleep to wake up fully rested. I then transcribe, catalog, and interpret my dreams accordingly.

Depending on the needs of the season, at least 40% of my dreams are word of knowledge, while another 60% are abstract symbolic dreams that require more time and interpretation for me to receive the message. The word of knowledge dreams are so purified, to-the-point, and immediately useful to help me parse what God wants me to do that I’ve started calling the Lord, “God my Contractor” because of the updates he gives me in dreams related to building my ministry or other interpersonal things.

When I get word of knowledge dreams, I’m usually excited to write them down quickly because I tend to need them in the very near future. When I get abstract dreams, I have to go on a longer process that includes a rest period, a pressing period, and multiple “clearly locking into place” moments when God solidifies and complexifies my understanding. I tend to let the abstract dreams rest for about 1-2 weeks minimum before transcribing them. When I transcribe symbolic dreams too quickly, I fail to digest them, forgetting important details in ways that leave me liable to miss the point.

I also tend to revisit my dreams as necessary (based on God’s timings, how he weaves things together in the natural) and when I cross into a new season in the Spirit. I usually know it’s a new season because it comes with a different emotional texture, different grace and new skill sets, clarity that was there before, and freedom. Since God sends you the grace and seed-sized gifts that you need to overcome at the beginning of every new season, I review my dreams from 1-2 seasons back (minimum) because I have fresh lenses from which to understand them. Generally speaking, whenever you step into a new season, you can reap a fresh harvest on your dreams, gleaning more insight from dreams you’ve already process or parsing dreams that were sealed before.

Investing in my Team

This month, I spent more time investing in the team of Prophets I’m supporting to prophecy over Youth and Young Prophets. As we started prophesying over the Youth of England in February and experimented with Prophetic Consulting for a German city in March, I spent additional time covering them in prayer so that they would be rooted in love, raised in family, and released into purpose. We are getting to the point in our meetings where we regularly share the most recent words that we are carrying for youth, openly talking about what makes us passionate. I’m focusing on helping them steward the burden well, find right positional placement and function for their gifts, and praying through barriers related to work, family, and life that need to be sorted for them to emerge into further ministry.

As we experience breakthrough, I’m recognizing the authority I have as a leader to call in good things over them, break off demonic assignments over their families, and hold the standard the cultivate a relational refuge ministry. As people catch godly passion, they are discovering how to utilize their bit to contribute to the shared vision, which produces momentum and excitement are building to partner with God. In April, I’m planning to spend more time studying how Paul prays for the Churches in the greetings and closing sections of his letters in order to understand how to better support them.

Praying for My Leaders

In healthy churches, leaders pray both for those who they are feeding as well as for their own spiritual mothers and fathers. Even as I invest in my team, I’m taking time to pray for the leaders who I’ve given an oversight role in my life, who embody Jesus’ Deuteronomy 6:5 holistic wellness.

One leader is emerging as an Apostle, but with many years more experience than me. I’m praying that God will increase her metron, giving her physical strength and stamina, ease and favor in ministry, and the capacity to bear greater weight. The Psalm 36:7 imagery is God stretching her to become an even more robust canopy for others.

Another mentor is a Shepherd who God has used for multiple decades to safeguard the holistic health and well-being of individuals called to the Office of a Prophet. This month, I’m praying that she would experience an equal measure of blessing to the grace she pours out over other people.

In both of these people, God has given me the specific help that I needed. I’m really grateful for their generous investment in my life and believe that whatever fruit I produce in ministry will also be credited to their account (Galatians 6:6).

Celebrating My Mentors

Benefiting from these women has caused me to reflect on the many people in my life who since childhood, have adopted me for a season. It is wild to consider the amount of grace and gifting God has added to my life through the Spirit of Adoption. Proportionate to the degree of closeness, I have seen gifts that their families embody transfer to me and enrich my family through the same spirit. I’m amazed by how God cross-pollinates people groups and ministries so that each individual, family, and ministry would receive grace that they wouldn’t have on their own.

This exchange reminds me of a prophetic dream God gave me in September about God pouring out grace for unlikely partnerships, and a more recent dream from March.

In this March dream, I was in a game-like scenario where an assortment of people had to humble themselves to get the food that they needed. It was different than the food that they normally would have eaten in a previous season. For example, I saw Los Angeles Californians humbling themselves to collect bulky carby potatoes. [Receiving from traditional sources] And I saw Old World Anabaptist men humbling themselves to collect newer, hip, niche varieties of heirloom tomatoes [Recieving new things from old sources that have been transformed]. God was creating the new thing by changing the sources that nourished us. Through cross-pollination in nourishment, he created cohesion.

Favorite Moments of Being Led

In reflecting on what has caused me to love and trust my leaders and bosses, God reminded me of specific moments when it was a joy to be led in the last few months.

• Specific moments where mentors have explicitly communicated ways I can contribute, their limitations, and given me clear feedback for what to expect. The way they both embodied and honored my core value for clarity and honesty.
• Specific moments of patience where leaders demonstrated a lack of partnership with offense. As someone who perceives conflict as low-stakes problem-solving at least 40% of the time, I appreciate other leaders who mirror back the capacity to patiently gather information, explore solutions, embody Christlikeness, and communicate a vision for restoration. These leaders also hate preventable loss and exude maturity that removes the potential for festering long-term issues.
• Moments where leaders have praised the quality of my work, the way I connect with people, the strategy behind how I lead or implement a vision. Since strategy delights me, having leaders that honor the great effort I make to be strategic is life-giving.
• Moments where leaders saw my natural inclinations (like attention to detail) and promoted me so that I could effectively use them. Moments where my gifts weren’t a threat but an asset.
• Moments when leaders have provided specific information and words of wisdom for how I should approach other leaders because they love to see the Church relate to one another as it should. Moments when leaders have celebrated effective bridges I have built and encouraged me to continue developing grace with people.
• Moments when leaders model generosity in their approachability, time, patience, and wisdom. Seeing them not harvest the gold in people for their own benefit, but co-invest in the people and reap a mutual harvest. Feeling affirmed in my value for generosity by seeing it echoed in them.
• Moments when leaders have encouraged me to cast vision or hear from the Lord without being afraid of risk. Moments where they didn’t idolize risk either, but released me into the proportionate authority that I could bear at the right time. This has meant neither overloading me with responsibility before I’m ready for it nor denying me the appropriate amount of freedom to rule.
• Moments where leaders have acknowledged and praised the amount of cost I have paid to see new expressions of ministry established. Instead of ignoring or disregarding the cost because it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, leaders have recognized and valued ways I have denied comfort, because they have also lived it.
• Any time that a leader mirrors the way that God is speaking to me, revealing himself to me in that season.

In general, when leaders have invested in me, I invest in them. I am so protective over who I let speak into my life, because I know that as I develop youth ministry, the way that people treat me is the way they will treat my kids. I have to seek out healthy leadership for myself if I want my team of adult leaders and the ministries we develop to embody the same characteristics.

The decision to prefer healthy leadership and seek it out exclusively reminds me of a moment this month when my boss embodied the values of Father God. While she is not a Christian, she mirrored Jesus’ emotions in this moment so effectively. The night before work, I had gotten lost in the process of making major decisions for life and ministry, and had failed to check the online schedule. I assumed that I was meant to be at work several hours later, and my shift was earlier than I thought. When I failed to arrive on time, my boss left me a message without condemnation. When I showed up to work as quickly as I was able, an hour after I was supposed to arrive, my boss’ recognized that it was likely not intentional and was primarily concerned for my safety. In that moment, she helped dismantle the remnants of perfectionism still in me, that say that my value is equal to my performance. Foundational moments like these are what ultimately create families out of people.

Ten thousand people may teach you about Christ, but I am your only father. You became my children when I told you about Christ Jesus.

1 Colossians 4:15

Reminding myself that God chose me for this work is easier when I see myself the way that my healthy mentors see me.

Sacrificial Love vs. Spiritual Warfare

This month, I spent most of my time interceding for people as a woman and friend rather than as Prophet. This has looked more like believing God’s best for them while I actively entrust them over to God than Strategic Spiritual Warfare (SSW). I’m convinced that knowing how to switch out of declarations and into Jesus’ sacrificial love is actually more aligned with God’s heart for restoration in this season.

Drawing upon Jesus’ sacrificial love for healing reminds me of when I was about 10 years old, and drew from some experiences of God’s unconditional love to reform my family. One day, I saw that my dad was struggling very tangibly with even his own poor choices. I wanted more for him. In the middle of a grocery store entryway, I very sincerely told him “I love you”, and he started to cry. We remained frozen like that for a few minutes, and a little startled, I tried to pull him out of incoming foot traffic. But it had touched something at his core, and he needed to just cry. You see, at that point in my family’s history, no one on either side of my family said those words to each other. However, the impact of the sincerity behind those words ultimately changed the trajectory of my family. Over the next several years, people began to say those words to each other on either side of my family, and the tradition has lasted to this day.

In knowing more about adults’ failures and walking in more clarity than was proportionate to my age, God redeemed these early experiences to form my deep value for redemption, forgiveness, and restoration. Every time I have contended on behalf of someone’s well-being in prayer from the same sacrificial approach, healing comes, whether sooner or later. The purity that is on children’s lives, the simplicity of wanting better for people you love makes this approach at least as effective as Strategic Spiritual Warfare to see individuals, groups, and nations set free.

Encounters in Worship: Sacrificial Love

This month, I partnered with God to release healing through Jesus’ sacrificial love when I encountered him in worship. This month, encounters would often start with me washing Jesus’ feet or something similar. In these encounters, his face would eventually change to resemble specific people from my past, largely people who hurt me. I got the sense that God would pour out grace for community healing as I ministered to them in the vision.

It reminded me of a dream I had at the end of December 2022:

I was an older leader whose only way of moving forward was worship. I saw God use it to form something wonderful, but it was at the altar of worship. And then I positioned myself to be sought out, once we had made the necessary adjustments. When it ended, I saw myself in a ministry team. Like, there was no separation. “Take it all, Jesus”. It was seriously dangerous to let God come so close because he wasn’t going to harm you, but he could change everything. Everything you thought you knew about yourself, and your ministry in a previous season. All changed, all adjusted. We chose Jesus either way.

God’s power to heal and redeem people is so much greater than what human beings can effect in the natural through conversations, counseling, ministry sessions, etc. God’s standard for his Church is more grieved not when we’ve failed to bring the right word, but failed to love and contend over people. He cares more about how well we love than accuracy, and he uses every hidden sacrifice.

Ultimately, God doesn’t just redeem people, he redeems entire communities. The story of Job was the story not just of one man’s life, but one man who God used to redeem his entire community. When Jesus promises to make “every wrong thing right”, he promises it not just to individuals, but their entire family lines, their children, the generations and generations of their nations and to the land itself. In this season, God really is making every wrong thing right in communities. He is restoring families of people and weaving new families out of his wholeness.

We don’t just speak in tongues to “recharge” in the Holy Spirit or declare truth in power. We speak in tongues to commune with God’s emotions, get his perspective on what he says about people, and commune with his love for communities. The mantle for mass healing and deliverance is always linked to this sacrificial place.

As my Pastor recently said, Jesus is both the Healthy Father and the one with the Eyes of Fire. He is aware of all of our cost, yet he is unwilling to leave us where we’re at. He sends clarity, refinement, purity, and calls for change because he wants more for us.

When has God called you to take a Strategic Spiritual Warfare (SSW) approach? When is he just calling you to intercede as a friend or family member? God always shows us revelation so that we can partner with him in redemption. Even when partnership looks like actively entrusting situations, people, and groups over to God, trust is action.

Jesus chose to die for his friends. His strategy was to be motivated by love.

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

John 15:13

Strategic Spiritual Warfare (Declarations Approach)	Sacrificial Love (Relational Approach)
Operating out of the Office of a Prophet or Apostle	Intercession out of Love and Friendship
Looks Like: Discerning a specific strategy based on revelation to bring redemption or wholeness to people, nations, or land Releasing Declarations that have that effect	Looks Like: Remaining in prayer past the point it serves you as a person and seeking others’ wholeness (2 Corinthians 11)
Mechanisms: -Spiritual Authority matters (Fatherhood or Motherhood) -Love for a nation matters (love them like a person). Similar to the way God loves nations is like loving people (Jeremiah 31:20) -Active involvement in the Resolution matters	Mechanisms: -Purity of Heart matters (James 5:16) -Spirit of Adoption matters (Book of Ruth) -Sacrifice matters (Luke 5:17-39, Genesis 22, 1 Samuel 1-2) -Active involvement by faith matters
Why does it work? God aligns people’s senses with his urgency for repentance, releasing conviction (not condemnation), and articulating a specific path towards wholeness	Why does it work? God aligns people’s hearts with his so that they can partner with him to release purity and truth. Alignment with God’s heart creates effective warfare.

Both: Forthtell the future out of love, the beauty God will bring out of it

How does God Reward Sacrifice in the Life of Jesus?

In Jesus’ life, God rewards him for not just coming in authority, but choosing a posture of sacrificial love. Isaiah 49:5-7 demonstrates the way God chooses to honor Jesus.

And now the Lord says—
    he who formed me in the womb to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him
    and gather Israel to himself,
for I am^[a] honored in the eyes of the Lord
    and my God has been my strength—
⁶ he says:
“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
    to restore the tribes of Jacob
    and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
    that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

⁷ This is what the Lord says—
    the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel—
to him who was despised and abhorred by the nation,
    to the servant of rulers:
“Kings will see you and stand up,
    princes will see and bow down,
because of the Lord, who is faithful,
    the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”

Isaiah 49:5-7

In this passage, God:

• Worships Jesus for all his work
• Vindicates Christ in the eyes of the nations
• Extends the covenant not just to Israel, but to the nations. Honors Jesus by giving him not just Israel, but the nations. A greater amount of inheritance in land in people.
• Promises to use Jesus to save people “to the ends of the Earth”

Like a grain of sand in the desert, Jesus was truly exceptional, truly unique. He is the most important person who ever has or will be born. A man who chose smallness on Earth, God will give him eternal grandeur and Rulership in Heaven. Through his sacrifices, Jesus shows us that love always makes a better way.

Names for God

Since December, I have been describing way that God reveals himself to me each month by giving him different names. This month, I’ve organized it into a separate “Names of God” section to further explore thematically-timely ways that God has been revealing himself through the text of the Bible.

Some of the names I assign to God are found in the text of the Bible, and I have referenced them accordingly so that other people will understand his character. Other names are completely new! Similar to the way David creatively gave God new names from a place of intimacy, I assign him different names based on my recent experiences, that correspond to biblical revelations of his character. Finally, some names are even polemic, reattributing praise back to Jesus by using names that are borrowed from other cultures, but more purely exemplified in him. An example of polemic reattribution of praise is found in the Exodus account, when God judged each Egyptian deity by exposing their limitations and reassigning their virtues to himself, as the One True God (1 Corinthians 8:6) and God Most High (Psalm 47:2).

These names tell the story of how I’ve come to relate to the Holy Trinity each month, and how that process has enriched my journey.

• Jehovah Shiloh, God of Perfect Peace
  • Delighting in the simplicity of God’s wisdom
  • 2 Corinthians 1:12 “For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you.”
• God of the Proportionate Response, Who responds to our degree of repentance or stubbornness
  • God who Gives to each one what they deserve (Romans 2:6)
  • God who Teaches me to Hold Promises Proportionately Lightly to the Size of the Word
    • Bringing the word actively before God and entrusting it over to him again and again
    • As God gives the promise back, he always does so with greater clarity, hope, and detail (Genesis 22). He never leaves a work unfinished.
• God, Master of the Human Heart
  • Psalm 97:5  The mountains melt like wax before the LORD, before the Lord of all the earth.
  • God who from the heart provides wholeness, holiness, right function, organically overflowing life
    • John 7;38 Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’”
• God, My Contractor
  • God who gives convenient updates on where he’s at in the building process and commits to building the house himself (Psalm 127).
  • God who Finishes what he Started
  • God who Calls us each to Take Ownership and Participate in the house he is building
    • Haggai 1:2-4 ² This is what the Lord Almighty says: “These people say, ‘The time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house.’” ³ Then the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: ⁴ “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?”
  • 1 Peter 2:5 You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
• God of Abundant Life
  • John 3:35-36 The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in His hands. 36Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever rejects the Son will not see life. Instead, the wrath of God remains on him.”i
    • Not believing in God’s promises, God’s word, in the testimony of Jesus, will always produce death
• God of Perfect Justice
  • God who engineers stories at a meta-level, designs ripple effects that will redeem the long-term stories of nations with various characters involved)
• God, the Final Word
  • God who ends uncertainty by his perfect words
• Christ, My Redeemer
  • Similar to a situation at work where we were playing a silly game similar to hockey. My friend who was on the losing team had felt guilty about letting his teammates down. When one of the players on my side bailed to continue overworking, I asked this friend if he wanted to know what it was like to be part of the winning team. We then won the next round, and he said that having the chance to redeem himself was really cathartic.
  • How many times does God offer the same opportunity to us, if we are willing to receive it?

Favorite Worship Music

Music reflects not just names of God, but his ways.

God who is Worthy of All Praise, Aleluya – Maverick City

Earlier this month, I felt Psalm 116 overflowing praise towards God, in ways that kept surging like water. In this song, the vocalists seem to mimic the same uncontainable praise through the connectedness of their phrases and vocal runs. I love how they’ve taken time to embody heart posture of overflowing praise not just by the lyrics or the composition, but by the way they perform it.

God of the Perfect Way, God of the Unknown Congratulations – Ada Ehi

If you have read these summaries for any small amount of time, you will know how obsessed I am with Ada Ehi’s joyful worship. This song has probably gotten the most love out of any I’ve shared on this site. In the song, she touches on mischaracterization, how God is the one to lift up, and how God rewards sacrifice. This song makes me admire how when we completely surrender plans, timings, methods to God, he always does things perfectly.

This month, I worshipped God to this song in the Unknown. It was like I was facing a completely unfamiliar, open space, and my worship floated into that emptiness, forming it. Worship is meant to call forth substance, and it was cool to see Jesus as God over the Unknown. There is such freedom in worshipping him with that degree of extreme flexibility.

Verses and Themes

And I’ve added a “Verses and Themes” section to further explore thematically-timely ways that God has been revealing himself through the text of the Bible.

• Receiving what is Earmarked in Heaven

John replied, “A man can receive only what is given him from heaven. 28You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but am sent ahead of Him.’ 29The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom stands and listens for him, and is overjoyed to hear the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. 30He must increase; I must decrease.

John 3:27-30

I love that John the Baptist was actually the one to name Jesus, “The Bridegroom” within a New Testament context. I love that John did so as a fruit of humility. I’m fascinated by this line, “A man can only receive what is given him from heaven.” If God hadn’t earmarked Christ for such greater glory (Isaiah 49), he would have never received it. This reminds me of how the Holy Spirit determines to each person what they will receive from God in destiny, gifting, and metron, engineering his story perfectly through surrender (1 Corinthians 12:11).

• Overflowing, Uncontainable Praise, Psalm 116-128

What shall I return to the Lord
    for all his goodness to me?

¹³ I will lift up the cup of salvation [Jesus]
    and call on the name of the Lord.
¹⁴ I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
    in the presence of all his people.

¹⁵ Precious in the sight of the Lord
    is the death of his faithful servants.
¹⁶ Truly I am your servant, Lord;
    I serve you just as my mother did;
    you have freed me from my chains.

Psalm 116:12-16

• The Spirit of Adoption in the Story of Hannah and Eli, Joseph and Jacob
  • Hannah: God used the Spirit of Adoption, Eli’s blessing, and Hannah’s purity of heart to allow the grace on Eli’s family to pass to a more righteous heir than his biological children. In the same way, God has adopted us all into his family (Romans 8) and allows grace to pass from his family to ours.
  • Joseph: God used the Spirit of Adoption to count Ephraim and Manasseh as Jacob’s own children, removing the bitterness of having them born into a foreign land and people group. In the same way, God removes the stigma of us not belonging to him (Haggai 1:4) and becomes our true Father.
    • God blesses Ephraim (“Fruitfulness”) more than Manasseh (“Forgetting”). While Joseph needed to forget his trauma for a season in order to thrive, God’s fruitfulness ultimately overtook the memory of his pain. In the same way, the life of Christ works its way in and through believers’ redeemed lives on the earth in ways that are far greater than their previous experiences (Psalm 126). God’s story ends in fruitfulness. Heaven will essentially be an experience of neverending fruitfulness with the one who always writes a better story.
  • Today, God also pours out the Spirit of Adoption to adopt people groups, individuals, and families to one another. In Hannah’s story, she initiates this exchange through her desire to bear a [godly] child. In Joseph’s story, Jacob buys back (redeems) Joseph’s children from the experiences their father had to live through. For this reason, Manasseh’s son (who is counted as Joseph’s own child) is named is “Makir”, which means “Bartered” or “Bought Back”. Like Jesus, Joseph bought redemption and new life (in the face of famine) for his family.
  • Godly adoption on Earth will always mirror God’s actions as the one who initiated the adoption of his people. This has implications for leadership in ministry, family, and social structure in general. On Earth, Godly adoption within a family must be initiated by individuals in the leadership role (parents) to mirror the way God seeks his people out. In a godly marriage, adoption must be initiated by an individual in the leadership role (a man) for the same reason (Genesis 2:24,Matthew 19:5,Mark 10:8,Ephesians 5:31).
  • In ministry, Godly adoption must be initiated by those in leadership towards those they are called to gather, nurture, and raise. Similar to the dynamic between Eli and Samuel, for the apostleship to be healthy, apostles must invest and nurture those they gather long before those sons and daughters are ready to take on the responsibility of leadership. Love always comes before discipline. Investment always comes before direction. Though Apostles generally embody this mothering and fathering, seeking and initiating capacity most tangibly within the Church, it is a responsibility for anyone who wants to lead well in society. I’m seeing this steadfast nurture modeled so well by the lead pastor at my Church and the integrity he displays in private. You can catch a glimpse of it in this sermon.

Media

These videos, movies, and books stood head and shoulders above the rest, this month.

Best of Youtube: Cinema Therapy

As someone who *clearly* loves analysis, it has been a joy to find this Cinema Therapy channel on Youtube. In this channel, a film producer and a family counselor conversationally analyze various modern movies from their separate perspectives, imparting layers of depth to the experience and exploring the quirks of the characters.

In this analysis of the movie Inside Out, the discussion focused not just on child development, but how sadness and joy are essential foils to one another. Towards the end of the video, the family counselor embodies this awareness when he talks about the death of his mom, and how even the happy memories he has of her have a tinge of sadness because he misses her. In general, I’d recommend this channel to anyone who loves complexity delivered in digestible ways.

On how Love is Deepened by Enduring Trials:

“There is a type of love that is only experiened by sadness,

A type of joy that is only experienced by grief.

And in a lot of ways, its the most beautiful of all, because when we give each other comfort, we show compassion. We show empathy. That’s the most beautiful form of love there is.”

-Counselor Man on this Channel

Best March Movies

Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes

This month, I was ill at ease with some of the sins I noticed in my nation. When I watched Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes, it felt like visually visiting a history museum and reminded me what I love about my nation’s past, and what I’m believing for its future. I love America’s honesty, belief in redemption, freedom, pioneering spirit, belief in social class equality, and natural beauty. This documentary is about the legacy of Beatrix Farrand, a woman Pioneer in the field of Horticulture, whose effect on the field of public gardens and landscape design is similar to the effect Florence Nightengale had on Nursing. Her expertise in the exhibition of the beauty of America’s land reminds me both of my family’s history of land stewardship and the way God would have the physical land of every nation flourish.

Hawa

This month, in order to visually process some of the conversations that I was having with God on the theme of adoption, I knew that I would need to watch a movie addressing that topic. In my human thinking, I imagined I’d find a documentary or some such thing. Yet when that path felt fruitless, I stumbled into this movie, which ultimately ended up finding me.

This movie is the story of a determined young girl who is looking for safety as her grandmother’s health continues to decline. It also explores the role of griot storytellers in West African culture, the ways that they have sung the future of families and history. Understanding griot’s better made me wonder again about what possibilities exist for sung prophecy over nations, people groups, and individuals.

War and Peace

I love the composition of this War and Peace miniseries, which breaks the great tomb of a novel into more digestible segments and highlights the main idea of the book, which is “People’s lives have many chapters.” The imagery of deconstruction during war and resurrection during peace felt apt for the season, and I appreciated the way it followed the same characters for a period of over a decade. The closing of the book and the imagery of springtime reminded me of the long arch of God’s story toward new creation. The last line of the movie quotes Tolstoy and carries similar, gospel-sized seeds of hope. Here is Tolstoy’s original quote, and the part in bold that the miniseries directly quoted. Compare it with

They say: “Sufferings are misfortunes.” But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.

Leo Tolstoy

But whatever was gain to me I count as loss for the sake of Christ. 8More than that, I count all things as loss compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ,a the righteousness from God on the basis of faith.

10I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to Him in His death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Phillipians 3:7-11

Best March Quotes from Books

I found several quotes this month as I worked on the proposal (plan) for my doctoral thesis that made me think about the sacrifices I have made in ministry, and how good things always come at a cost. I’m grateful that Jesus models that same love of surrender that makes such freedom and sacrificial risk possible.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

T.S. Elliot, Little Gidding IV in Finding Our Way, Leadership for an Uncertain Time (pg 242) by Margaret Wheatley

Do I experience the demands of love as an intolerable shirt of flame? I know I feel there is no escape from this path, but I dont yet know that this path leads only to fire. I do, more and more, feel as my companions those from all centuries who followed the blinding path of Love, who willingly donned the shirt of flame and wore it to their martyrdom. Recently I’ve been reflecting on how strange we are, my generation, to believe that we can help birth a new world without it affecting our career progress. I’m aware of how little courage our lives have required of us. But Life keeps raising the stakes.

…

But Love is not satisfied by logic. It may be that we’ll accomplish the latest revolution with grace, that we’ll marshall the powers of nonviolence and people will willingly surrender their ideas and their power because they are too tired of the violence and impotence. But maybe not. Maybe the only route to Love is fire, or fire. I don’t know this, but that I have had surrender to this as a great possibility. I have had to confront whether I am willing, if asked, to forego the life that holds me so securely and comfortably. And I don’t know what I have answered, because life hasn’t answered me. I believe. I have recognized the shirt of flame, but will I be asked to wear it?

Finding Our Way, Leadership for an Uncertain Time pg 243 by Margaret Wheatley

Prayer Requests

• Greater freedom and peace, greater abundance of Christ’s life
• Protection over the boundaries of my time in this season, both in daily events and in the full length of the season. Nothing less than the full measure of time that I need to receive from God.
• Grace to continue to change and adapt
• More worship