CRI Part 3 – Isaiah 58

Isaiah 58. Let’s just pause for a moment and look at Isaiah 58.

“Is this not the fast which I choose,
To loosen the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
And to let the oppressed go free
And break every yoke?
Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry
And bring the homeless poor into the house;
When you see the naked, to cover him;
And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light will break out like the dawn,
And your recovery will speedily spring forth;
And your righteousness will go before you;
The glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
You will cry, and He will say, ‘Here I Am’
If you remove the yoke from your midst,
The pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,
And if you give yourself to the hungry
And satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
Then your light will rise in darkness
And your gloom will become like midday.
And the LORD will continually guide you,
And satisfy your desire in scorched places,
And give strength to your bones;
And you will be like a watered garden,
And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail.”
(Isaiah 58:6-11, New American Standard Bible)

I can’t claim to really understand most of the book of Isaiah. It has intimidated me for most of my life. Though I have definitely been feeling an itch to study it, lately. (More, Lord. Help, Lord!)

I am not in a position to give a stunning exposition of the words of this chapter… or any of the book. But a few things do seem rather clear to me in this passage.

The Lord is answering Israel’s accusing question: Why is He not acting in response to their fasts? Why are they not seeing prosperity and justice?

His answer. Stop oppressing people and serving yourselves. Stop striving with one another and exalting yourselves. Walk out justice. Care for the poor and the hurting. Liberate the oppressed. Help the needy and the afflicted.

This is what God requires of His people. He loves justice. The church should do more than ask God to make things right. They should do their part in bringing forth justice.

That, in essence, is what I believe CRI does. They serve the afflicted. They give of themselves. They pour themselves out to help those who are hurting and in need. And they have an incredible open door to bring the light of true hope into the midst of devastation and tragedy.

It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

CRI Part 2 – My Backstory

The summer of 2005 was nearing an end and I was about to make the move to Kansas City, where I would be joining full-time staff at the International House of Prayer. I had gone through the FITN internship in the two previous summers and had just spent a month of that summer in Kansas City, longing to fully join the ministry. My heart was full of joy and anticipation, finally released to join the beloved NightWatch community.

And then Hurricane Katrina hit.

CRI Part 1 – Sean Malone’s Message

A few weeks ago, we had a very stirring message at our weekly FCF service. (If you are interested, you can buy the MP3 for $2.99 here. I think it is well-worth the money and the time.) Sean Malone, the director of Crisis Response International (CRI), shared and introduced his ministry, which is now becoming more officially connected with the International House of Prayer.

If you haven’t already heard of CRI, I strongly recommend checking out their website: www.criout.com

In summary, CRI is a disaster response ministry. Borrowing a sentence from their website: “Our vision is to train an army of end-time, prophetic, mercy missionaries, mobilized in the spirit of night and day prayer, to release great demonstrations of power, reach the harvest in crisis and rebuild cities on the Kingdom of God. “

Yes… that is a pretty loaded sentence. I am fluent in IHOP-ese and I STILL have a hard time keeping up with that sentence. Rather than unpacking each of those terms here, though, I seriously recommend listening to the message. He breaks it all down and gives a very clear summary of what CRI is all about. (And he tells stories. Who doesn’t love a good story?)

I had multiple people tell me that they were thinking of me during this message. And it makes sense that they were.

When I heard the message, what I experienced was more than being stirred by a great vision. When he cast the vision, it fully resonated with something that I have been carrying in my heart for years. It was an incredible moment. This thing that I have been weeping about for years was beginning to take shape. My own vision found greater clarity and I sensed the beginning stages of something I have carried in prayer finally coming to fruition.

In a few days, I will be heading into the woods with CRI to do a four-day training. I am more excited than I can articulate. I am also fairly nervous. It is a sober but hopeful expectation. I know that I am going to be REALLY stretched. But I feel the Lord in it and I trust His leadership. Please pray for me. The training will be taking place October 8-11.

I have more to say about all of this than I could fairly put in one post, so I will be writing a series of posts about CRI. If it’s any indication, I wrote 14 pages about this in my journal the other night. And training hasn’t even started yet.

If you are interested in hearing the message but don’t have the money (or feel sufficiently MP3-savvy), let me know. We might be able to work something out.

A Lot to Say

I find myself incapable of blogging, at the moment. The reason? I simply have too much to say.

We, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, celebrated our 10th anniversary last weekend. 10 years of 24/7 worship and prayer seems like so much… and so little.

As part of the celebration, Mike took us back through the prophetic history. Mike simply shared stories from the last few decades about how the Lord was giving vision for this ministry (really, this movement) and beginning to ready the hearts of our leaders to keep a growing body of mostly 20-somethings centered in the Word and in the heart standards of Intercession, Holiness, Offerings to the Poor, and the Prophetic.

Every time I listen to the prophetic history, it stirs me. Never has it gripped me and shaken with the intensity of this last week. I also felt like I was getting a lot of correction from the Lord as we heard the stories and were given exhortations. Correction is always painful. However, I must also say that I am feeling the Lord’s kindness, in His correction, and that my heart is greatly encouraged.

At the end of the celebration, we committed ourselves to 24/7 works of justice to accompany our 24/7 prayers for justice. This means a much greater emphasis on evangelism and on serving our community. I am so grateful for this. It has been a growing longing within my heart, and I am overwhelmed to see it begin to come to fruition in our community. I have been weeping over this in a distinct way for about a year and a half.

No simple words exist to describe the major shift that is happening in my life right now. I feel like this is such a critical time for me. I can no longer live the way I was living before. I am feeling a greater weight of responsibility. I am also feeling a greater grace to walk in the risky things that the Lord has set before me.

Even in the last week, things have been happening to me in the place of prayer that I have experienced only rarely. And I am finding a boldness growing within me that I never imagined was possible, before.

My heart is full of hope. My heart is also very heavy, as the Lord has been sharing His emotions with me and causing me to feel the pain of injustice. In particular, there is an unsaved man that I have been carrying in my heart this week. Never have I felt such a “burden” of intercession.

I am also getting ready to do training with a ministry called Crisis Response International. I was originally planning on writing about three posts on this alone.

So, as I find time and language, I will begin to give expression to the many things that are shifting within me… and shifting around me. I could write pages about each of the above sentences.

I really encourage you to check out the videos and audio from our 10th anniversary celebration. I will post in more detail, recommending specific videos that are especially meaningful to me. But, if you want to go check it out, everything is available online at www.ihop.org.

More to come!

Hope for Healing

Yesterday, I began getting a headache in the evening. Assuming I must be dehydrated, I kept sucking down the water.

Earlier in the day, I had spent some time in the sun. It was 99 degrees outside, so I was pretty sweaty and gross. Since I was so gross, I decided the best follow-up activity would be sweating some more at the gym. Anyone who gets a lot of headaches has probably been told plenty of times that they just need to drink more water. Truth be told, this is the reason that I drink more water than anyone I know. I spend a large percentage of my day swallowing water or using the restroom. (We can safely assume that dehydration is rarely the actual cause of my headaches.) But, I’ve heard it enough that I still assumed my headache that began forming in the evening was due to a drinking failure.

As the night went on and my headache progressed, I realized how much water I had taken in, the frequency with which I needed to empty my bladder, and the reality of how great I felt when I got back from the gym and was in the kitchen, baking. If anything, I might have overdone the water intake for the day.

11:00/midnight rolled around and I started my prayer time, logging into to the blessed prayer room webstream… a lifeline for extended times away. Rose (a beloved part of the extended IHOP-KC family) had surgery coming up within a few hours and there was a lot of emphasis on prayer for healing. And there was A LOT of life on the prayers. I was definitely feeling it, from my little prayer room extension… my bedroom.

Around 1:20, Emily Russell prayed. And that was it. I don’t know what happened, but it was like she cracked something open. I sat weeping on my bed for the next 30 minutes.

Now, crying tends to make my bad headaches worse. (Probably no more than refusing to cry, though.) So it wasn’t looking too good for me and my headache. But I was really dialoguing with the Lord about His desire to heal, His promises to our community, and the promises of scripture. He IS a God who heals.

This might sound weird, but in all of my investigation and searching for my migraine triggers, there is one thing I have noticed that has been terribly consistent (well, kind of two, but I won’t go into the second). You won’t find this trigger listed anywhere that talks about migraine headaches. My “trigger”? Prayer.

The more I have broken my agreement with consistent headaches in my life, the more I have woken up from my place of resigning to it, the more I have asked God to heal me, and the more others have partnered with me in praying for healing… the worse and more frequent they have gotten. Every time I stand for healing prayer in the prayer room or sit in the back row for healing prayer, I am almost guaranteed noticeable backlash in the very near future.

So, as I sat there joining my heart with the prayers of my community and asking the Lord to do what He longs to do, I couldn’t help but laugh at the rapid worsening of my headache.

I don’t understand why it is like that. I definitely don’t fully understand warfare. I’m not OK with the fact that prayer, in essense, seems to make my headaches worse. But I am taking it as evidence that the Lord has finally awakened me to the real battle for my physical healing. He is able to heal me. And I believe that He will. And the “backlash” has given me hope that sickness is desperately fighting against me… grasping on as it ultimately looses its grip on me. I also take it as a sign of hope in my once apathetic and numbed heart. As Moltmann has said: as freedom gets closer, the chains begin to hurt.

By 3 AM, my headache had landed and settled in to its usual loction, right behind my eye. Definitely a migraine.

It was pretty miserable, but not bad enough yet that I couldn’t sleep. It was well after four before I managed to be unconscious, but I did, happily, get a little sleep. A little. Until I finally reached the point where that was impossible.

I spent most of that morning (when I should have been sleeping) pleading with the Lord, trying desperately not to move, and in far too much pain to have any hope of being unconscious. You wouldn’t believe how long I resisted my miserable trip to the bathroom before the desire to NOT wet myself won out. I probably should have let myself throw up at that time. It took a lot of restraint not to. And I might have felt a little better if I had. But I despise vomitting. (As helpful as it sometimes is.)

I returned to my bed, updated my status to ask for prayer, and continued to lay there, pleading with the Lord to do something about the pain.

After some time, sleep came. That in itself felt like a miracle.

I woke up a couple of times to find that I wasn’t in excruciating pain anymore. I would thank the Lord, roll over, and go back to sleep. Such joy!

I finally got out of bed at 2:30. And my head didn’t hurt at all. No, really… not at all. I know migraine headaches can be as short as a few hours, but I can’t say I’ve ever been that fortunate.

I’m usually pretty dizzy and nauseated, with a low-level headache for the day or two after a migraine. But…

I continued through the rest of the day feeling wonderful. As if I hadn’t just suffered through one of my most horrendous migraine headaches. In fact, it didn’t even feel like the day after a migraine. I think twice in the entire day, I felt a little sick/dizzy. But it passed almost immediately and may have been a food thing.

I have never had that happen before. I have never had a headache of that intensity so quickly and completely disappear.

So… my conclusion: prayer works. Thank You, Lord!

As far as I know, that’s the last one. And until I know otherwise, I will continue to live in the hope and possibility that it is.

That’s the tension of waiting for healing. True hope causes you to live every day in the possibility that maybe that’s your day. (Thank you, Leah Morgan, for reminding me of that and helping give me the courage to continue hoping as the circumstances overwhelmed me.) Hope is dangerous. It opens you up to pain (and joy). Because hope deferred truly does make the heart sick. Disappointed hopes are painful because hope is the stubborn resistance to the temptation to be unfeeling and indifferent. Hope like that is only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are too weary, without His strength, to continue in the vibrant life that hope awakens.

So, I am still choosing the life of hope. I am leaning on the Holy Spirit, daily being renewed by His life within me. And the God of Hope is filling me with all joy and peace in believing, causing me to abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13).

And I am grateful for His healing power, manifesting itself in the world, in my life.

Suppression Unto Deprivation

My first week in Texas was… rough. I was tired and overwhelmed. I felt my confidence completely deteriorating. And I found it unusually difficult to engage in a real way with the people I was giving time to be with.

Every time I opened my mouth and said something real that came from a place of any depth, I felt that I could, at any moment, completely fall apart. It didn’t matter where I was. It didn’t matter who I was with. If I dipped anywhere below the surface, I was sure to break down and begin bawling.

This was a problem. I did not want to burden my friends with my emotions. There was a lot of catching up to do. I didn’t feel like crying in public. I didn’t have time to go there. I didn’t really want to be that vulnerable.

So, quite naturally and with little thought, I suppressed my emotions. It took a lot of energy and an almost sub-conscious intentionality. But my once-perfected skill of shutting down my emotions kicked in and I was able to numb myself with very little conscious thought.

I stuck to the surface. If I felt myself about to crack, I would alter my course and steer away from the touchy things. I said relatively little. I felt very little.

There were two major consequences to responding to my emotions in this way. First, it became virtually impossible to relate to anyone in a real way, as I was setting apart significant time to meet with people. It’s hard to connect with a person with any depth when you are determined to stay at the surface. Simple contradiction. Second, I COULD NOT sleep.

Yes. I suppressed my emotions so thoroughly that it was keeping me up at night. It was exhausting.

After about a week of sleep deprivation, I finally realized what I was doing. So, Thursday morning, as I was failing again to fall asleep, the floodgates broke and I just started to cry.

From that point, I resolved not to shut down emotionally, for the rest of my time in Texas. Since then (the last three or four days)… I’ve cried A LOT.

One week to go. A lot of pain remains that I haven’t even touched. But the Holy Spirit, my Comforter, is with me. So I’m feeling pretty hopeful about the next seven days.

Mom’s Cookbook

Unless there is a high probability of complete disaster, I don’t think you can call it real baking. What I just did: REAL.

Without my mom around to fill in the gaps, her cookbook can feel like more of a riddle book. “Here are the things you’ll need. Good luck turning them into something that resembles the above title.”

Fortunately, my mom had a great love for post-its. If we are lucky, we might find a post-it floating around in the loosely bound heap of stained pages, a post-it that contains clues for the journey.

Tonight’s recipe listed the ingredients and told us (in vague and general terms) what to do with the dough.

At first, I was a little bothered by the lack of information to get me to the dough stage. Fortunately, I knew enough about baking to start by mixing the dry ingredients, continue by cutting in the shortening, and conclude with the addition of the wet ingredients.

After I was pretty committed to my determined process, I found a magical post-it that told me to do exactly what I was already doing. The find was actually rather fortunate, though. It mentioned two ingredients that I had COMPLETELY OVERLOOKED. (Grease-spots all over the pages cause the ink from the reverse side to blend in with the ink on the facing side. I wasn’t being careless. The ingredients were hiding… in their clever camouflage. Not to mention, the rapidly-decaying cookbook necessitates delicate handling, making careful inspection rather tricky. OK… maybe I was being a little careless. Can I blame it on the fact that I was fairly emotional?)

The recipe called for 4.5 cups of flour. It’s probably a good idea to have at least 7 cups on hand if being able to actually work with the stuff is at all desirable. What kind of recipe requires rolling THE STICKIEST DOUGH IN THE WORLD? Oy.

The whole venture was perpetually on the brink of a total catastrophe. My “cat noises” were at an all-time high. And I ended the evening covered in flour. (I really need to invest in an apron. Or at least choose not to wear black.)

And I missed my mom like crazy the entire time. I wish she could have come in and laughed at me as I wrestled with the obstinate ingredients. (Or… ummm… to teach me how to persuade them to adopt a more cooperative posture.) I wish she was here to partake of the resulting super-yum when the timer went off. I wish she was here to congratulate me on my success.

I just wish she was here.

iPhone Fun

My dad bought me an iPhone. (Thanks, Dad!) and I absolutely love the thing.

Since jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, my blog has kind of died off. I post occasionally. But not with the same frequency as before.

One reason for the Twitter-induced coma that my blog has fallen into is the simple fact that I could tweet from ANYWHERE, updating my status from my phone. It was far easier to tweet than to blog. (Not to mention, the 140-character limitation made the constant updates fit quite easily into my busy schedule.)

Well… Now that I have my iPhone, I can also blog from anywhere. I can’t make any promises… But it seems likely that I might begin blogging more frequently.

If this does happen, my posts will probably be shorter than usual. (Probably to the betterment of my blog.) And… They will probably be riddled with typing errors. My grammar may even suffer due to the change of pace and weird changes that I might make without really paying attention to what I have done. (Probably to the betterment of my condition as a grammar snob and recovering perfectionist.)

We shall see…

The Complexities of Simplification

Today has been a miserable day. I know I’ve said this before, but the grieving process really doesn’t make ANY sense to me.

I’ve been occupied with some intense decluttering, simplifying, and letting go in the last few weeks. I guess I should have known how difficult it would be. I probably should have realized that I would be confronted with a million Mom things that were going to be really painful to contemplate releasing.

It’s amazing how difficult it can be to get rid of something that I have in any way associated with my mother.

Today was a big day. And I didn’t even realize it until I was curled up in the fetal position and bawling on the sound booth floor, leaving no one at my screens post.

On one of her last visits to Kansas City, my mom had spent a considerable amount of time hanging these little shelve things in my room. She had sketched out an entire layout for these shelves that were intended to house my Willow Tree figurines. A bunch of my friends (and my boyfriend, who was cooking for us that night) were over so that my mom and friends from Texas could get to know them a bit. We had great difficulty coaxing her to come and join us because she would not walk away from her project. She loved to express her love through giving and serving.

When I moved out of that room into the little basement apartment, I never took those shelves down. I couldn’t do it. So my incomplete wall of stuff decorated a chunk of Des and Jen’s room for the entire time that they lived in the house.

Well, we have a new roommate, now. And I realized that it was a bit ridiculous that pieces of my life are still residing in two bedrooms that I no longer physically occupy in our house. So, I took the shelves down today.

As I was boxing all of the little figurines, I found one that was still in its box. At the top of the box, stuck to the styrofoam, was a note from my mom.

Needless to say, my project for the day experienced a long delay. I couldn’t see a thing anymore, so I just stood there crying.

Fact: I have too much stuff. I value simplicity and the fasted lifestyle. There is a contradiction between my values and my circumstances. I need to let go of some things.

Fact: So many of my things have my mom attached to them. I want to hold on to every little bit of her that I still can.  The most important woman of my life is gone. How can I give up the tiny remnants of her life that surround me? It’s all that I have.

I’m still doing it. I’m not letting go of everything that I perhaps should, but I am letting go of little things here and there. And it is shredding my heart to pieces.

I just want her back in my life. It has been far too long.

Grounded from Facebook

Once again, I have encountered the reality that I am weak and prone to do stupid things.

This week, my immaturity has shone through in the realm of facebook. Oh facebook.

I made a series of really bad decisions. Sadly, I kind of knew that the things I was doing were not wisdom. But I pressed right through all of the little “Wait, don’t do that,” whispers in my spirit. …Until I reached a crowning moment of stupidity that led to an irreversible action with great potential of hurting someone else.

Did I hurt the other person? I honestly don’t know. They responded to my poor choices very graciously.

Before the other person respond, I realized what I had done and how uncool it was. And I saw the progression of bad decisions that had led to that point.

Oh, God, I just ate Cakey! Why did I open the fridge door? WHY?

(I understand that the last line might make absolutely no sense to most people. The only real chance of full comprehension is a familiarity with one of the most brilliant messages ever spoken by Mike Pilavachi.)

I decided that I needed to take a break from facebook. Wisdom says to pluck your eye out of it is causing you to sin. My weakness and facebook were proving to be a deadly combination.

I won’t get into details about what happened. That would be inappropriate and involve exposing the details of someone else’s person life. But, I will leave you with these basic principles: