Porches & Promises.
A deep curiosity of the unknown swept over me as I patiently waited on the strangers porch. I must have looked really out of place sitting there in my long flowy skirt with a hiking backpack and a teddy bear in my lap. The fields were green with life. Work trucks made their way up and down the dirt roads and the drivers acknowledged me with a simple wave. I wondered what they were thinking seeing me there. Every Chevy Colorado that passed by made me miss the mountains back home. I realized staring into the field just how tired I was. The sound of the cows mooing and the birds singing brought my anxious heart a sense of ease. A week before I had a nice warm bed, a great job and a life I enjoyed. I hadn’t had time to fully process how I was feeling about being in Kentucky. I hadn’t even really had time to say goodbye to everyone. Leaving everything behind in Colorado had already been worth it, but it had taken an emotional toll on me. I was grieving the loss of my comfort zone, and had managed to suppress my feelings in the midst of full throttle revival and ministry. The last weekend had been a whirlwind of demons getting cast out of people, salvations, muddy water baptisms and the power of God showing up. It was an honor to be apart of what the Lord was doing. My heart felt full, but physically, mentally and emotionally I was exhausted. This was the first time I really had any time to myself since leaving Colorado. I opened my Bible and began to pray. I was reminded of the last faith journey I went on a decade before. I had plenty of time to reminisce as I patiently waited for my new host family to come home.
I was 20 years old and had just taken one of the biggest risks of my life by choosing to attend a Discipleship Training School with YWAM (Youth With A Mission) I chose Jesus instead of continuing my current lifestyle of partying with my friends and engaging in the sins of the world. At this point, I knew the Lord and had been baptized in the Holy Spirit speaking in tongues for a few years now, but I wasn’t fully living for Him. I was terrified of full surrender, but I knew I couldn’t continue down the path I was headed. I needed Jesus. He honored my yes by completely transforming my life through YWAM that summer. It was during that time that I first began to learn about the gifts of the Holy Spirit - like prophesying over people. We had spent an entire week focusing on the reality that Jesus paid a high price for us to have unmerited access to the voice of His Holy Spirit as a Counselor, Helper and Friend. I had experienced hearing God’s voice before, but it seemed to be something that didn’t happen all the time. It was new for me to have faith that when I call on Him, He will answer me (Jeremiah 33:3, Psalm 91:15) After our week on “Hearing God’s Voice”, I was intentional about listening for it. I was unwilling to believe the lie any longer that I couldn’t hear God’s voice. Ryan was one of my best friends during that season and we stayed connected long after we’d met in YWAM. We were both zealous and hungry for more of God. We decided to hold each other accountable to the things we learned during our Discipleship Training School. He used to call me and ask me to “practice hearing God’s voice” for his friends on the other end of the phone in California. He wouldn’t tell me anything about them beforehand. I was learning how to recognize the voice of the Holy Spirit by asking Him how He saw people. I’d often call Ryan and ask him to do the same for my friends in Colorado. We’d simply pray and ask, “Jesus, how do you see this person?” Ideas would pop in my head about something they were good at or a special quality unique to that person. Then I would muster up the courage to share it and see if it was right. The joy of the Lord would hit everyone on the phone as we would “know” things about the strangers, just by asking God to speak to us. It was something we learned in our YWAM training - our spiritual ears are muscles that need to be exercised and grow stronger the more we use them. After months of being intentional about hearing God’s voice and not letting the lies win, He started to speak to me and encounter me in new ways.
My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me. John 10:27
I wanted all that Jesus paid for me to have on the cross, including the new wine the Bible talks about. I was young and zealous. I didn’t care what it looked like to anybody else. I wanted to experience more in my relationship with Jesus and was willing to do whatever it took for Him to fully possess me, including dying to the ways of the world. It was the night of my 21st birthday and I was determined to get drunk in the spirit. I wanted a God encounter for my birthday. I had heard stories of people being so filled with the Holy Spirit that the people around them thought they were drunk. (Ephesians 5:18, Acts 2) I turned down all the offers to go out on the town to celebrate my birthday the way the world does. After hours of worship in my bedroom alone, I was overwhelmed by His presence and went to bed drunk on that “new wine”, praising Him for the gift of His Holy Spirit. That night I had my first prophetic dream for someone else. He had showed me in detail what was happening in the life of a friend of mine I hadn’t talked to in a long time. I called her up the next day and prayed with her based on what I saw in my dream. I was amazed. He had gifted me with a new way to hear His voice for my birthday. The more I sacrificed my time and energy to hear Him, the more He met me. Little did I know, only a few weeks after that experience my life was about to dramatically change. One morning, Ryan’s friend Sia called me up. He was one of the people I’d practiced hearing God’s voice with on the phone a few weeks before. We’d never actually met in person, but we stayed in touch on social media. “Hey Becca! I was practicing hearing God’s voice this morning and I felt like you’re supposed to come to California, so I bought you a one-way plane ticket - for today!” I knew this was my moment to make good on a promise I’d made many times to the Lord - “Send me, I’ll go!” I quit my job that same day, (God bless you Chris Wiggington!) and said a quick goodbye to my family. I headed to the airport with $35 dollars to my name. My grandma was kind enough to transfer me $100 when she heard what was going on. I had no plan other than to board that plane with the little that I had and continue to practice hearing God’s voice on the west coast. Ryan and Sia picked me up from the airport and we went straight to a worship gathering at one of their buddies parent’s house. The glory of God broke out in that place as young people gathered together on a Friday night to worship God. Just like I had experienced on my 21st birthday, we were all drunk with new wine worshipping the Lord until late in the night. Some of us couldn’t even walk straight, we were so overcome by the joy of the Lord. It was around 2am that I realized I had no idea where I was going to sleep that night. Another one of Ryan’s friends, Michael, shared with me that his family felt like God was telling them they’d be inviting someone into their home soon. They already had a bed ready for me and welcomed me into their family for the next few weeks. Terri and Steve were the hands and feet of Jesus to me while I was there! They loved me like one of their own. I had never experienced Kingdom family like that before and didn’t really know how to steward it well.
I could hear the sound of chickens up the road. My nerves began to turn into expectant faith as I sat on the concrete bench waiting to meet this family in Kentucky for the first time. What was God up to now? My mind began to race with testimonies of what I had experienced the last time I left Colorado with nothing more than a backpack in 2012.
One of my favorite testimonies from that time in California happened the very next day after I arrived. Michael and I rode his motorcycle down to Laguna Beach. I’d never been to Orange County before. On the way there, we saw a man sitting at a bus stop and decided to stop and talk to him. This man had actually been contemplating suicide just minutes before when something told him not to jump off the bridge. We met him at the bus stop on his way back home that day. Michael shared the gospel with him, and in the same notebook where he had written a suicide note, I started jotting down scriptures about God’s love for him. The man’s name was Rick. He was so overtaken by the love of God that he wept in Michael’s arms until the bus pulled up. The next bus stop he got off at, had a Bible sitting on the bench waiting for him. Only God! He looked up the scriptures I wrote down and called us from a payphone and gave his life to the Lord that day. I spent my time at Michael’s house waking up and asking God what to do with my day. Sometimes the answer was as simple as, “Just sit in my presence.” I was learning to trust Him with my time. I was learning to trust Him with everything. Eventually I joined up with another YWAM school in southern California called Circuit Riders. I continued to share the gospel and go wherever the Lord led me. I wanted to see God show up everywhere I went! After a few months in California, He led me to staff a YWAM school near Battleground, WA. While there, I started a new relationship and we both thought God was leading us to get married. He ended up leaving me 10 days before our wedding date without giving me a reason why. He started dating another girl right away and they married a few months later. We had planned out our whole wedding and invited everyone we knew, I was humiliated by the outcome. It wasn’t the first time I’d been engaged. I thought I was going to marry my high school sweetheart too. I was so embarrassed that I was going through a failed engagement for a second time now. A sense of rejection hung over my head like a rain cloud. Even though I had been following the leading of the Shepard’s voice and seeing salvations, signs and wonders that whole year, that heartbreak in Washington felt like an indicator that I didn’t hear God’s voice clearly anymore. I felt like a complete failure. Maybe I should have just gone to college. I went on our honeymoon to Hawaii with a friend, instead of my future husband and cried in the hotel almost the entire time. I felt like I had failed in the area that meant the most to me - hearing God’s voice. I wanted every aspect of my life to be influenced by His leading, and somehow it seemed I had terribly failed. I felt like one of those stupid sheep who had somehow walked right off a cliff. I read the Bible everyday in that hotel room. If I couldn’t hear the Holy Spirit speaking to me anymore, I knew I could at least read the word of God. The Bible uses two different Greek words in the Bible for “word of God”. One form is the Greek word rhema - which refers to a living being who speaks. The other Greek word is the word logos - the written word of God. I had allowed trauma and a fear of failure to put spiritual ear muffs on me and I started doubting the rhema word of God in my life. As soon as I started second guessing the voice of the Holy Spirit, I stopped seeing Him move the way I once did. What if the “visions” I was seeing were just in my imagination? I dove deeper into reading the Bible. The logos - or written word of God - felt safer to me than trusting that I could hear His voice in other ways too. I thought I’d clearly been “overly zealous” and shut down my own faith in the process. I packed up my things in Washington and lived out of my car for awhile after that, trying to get right with God. I didn’t realize at the time that the enemy was attacking my confidence in hearing God’s voice. I was taking the attack personally and believed the lie that something was wrong with me. Eventually I started memorizing God’s promises in scripture and stepped into a greater understanding of my identity in Christ. The truth is, He promises to speak to us, through both the rhema word and the logos word. I went from having faith that He speaks, to having faith in His promises over me. He promises to guide us. He promises to give us strength, to help us, to never leave us or forsake us, to answer us when we call to Him, to give us wisdom in our time of need (for references scroll to the bottom) Over time, as I stood on His promises for me in the Bible, my heart healed and I began to trust the voice of the Holy Spirit again.
It’s not that I never struggled with doubting God’s voice after that. Even as I went through the process of laying everything down in Colorado to come out to Kentucky, I had moments of asking myself, “Is this even God?” Hebrews 11:6 says that, “without faith, it is impossible to please God.” Sometimes the only way to really know if it is Him, is to take a leap of faith and find out.
As I sat there on their porch reminiscing on that faith journey almost a decade ago now, another truck pulled up the dirt road, this time turning into the driveway. A blond haired woman around my age climbed out of the truck with her husband and they invited me in. I was relieved at how normal they seemed. Just a few hours before I had met one of their friends who called them to see if they would open their home to a random Jesus lover, traveler girl. It’s not everyday you get a call like that. I was thankful they were open to bringing me in, even though I was a complete stranger not just to them, but also to their friend. “We are so glad you’re here!” Rachel’s warm invitation brought my heart some much needed comfort. She showed me around their home and introduced me to their new puppy. I could tell just by the peace in the atmosphere of their home that these people truly loved Jesus. Their guest room felt like a Hilton suite after tent camping in the mud all weekend. After getting settled and cleaned up, they invited me to have dinner with them. We sat around the table and exchanged stories. They had been praying that their home would be a safe resting place for people. Rachel reassured me that nothing was required of me but to drink their coffee, eat their food and bask in the love of Jesus while they were at work during the day. They both glowed with the love of Jesus.
“Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace…”
-1 Peter 4:9-10
I was so thankful for their hospitality. I spent the next few days at their farm house resting in His promises over me. He didn’t lead me all this way to abandon me. I was thankful for my new friends and thankful that I had a few days before the next tent revival to strengthen myself in the Lord. I couldn’t afford to be anxious about what was next. I needed to stay anchored and keep any “spiritual ear muffs” or lies from the enemy far from me.
“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
-John 15:4-5
The Greek word for ‘abide’ in John 15 is the word ‘meno’. It literally means to remain, to stay, to continuously be present. Life can throw us all sorts of curve balls and get us to doubt God’s promises. In what areas of your life do you need to be reminded of the promises of the Lord in scripture today? Take a moment to ask Him. He speaks. In what areas of your life do you need to lay down anxiety and take up His rest? The book of Hebrews tells us that to truly know rest, we have to know His promises. What would it look like to abide in His promises over you this week? We serve a God who longs to speak to us - through both His rhema word and written word. When we struggle with doubting to hear His voice, He is gracious enough to draw us back in with His promises in scripture. There are over 300 promises of God for us to stand on and rest in.
Here are a few of the scriptures that I am standing on this week:
He speaks to you (Jeremiah 33:3, Psalm 91:5)
He will guide your steps (Proverbs 16:9)
He will strengthen you and help you (Isaiah 41:10)
He will never leave you (Hebrews 13:5)
He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7)
He has a good plan for you (Jeremiah 29:11)
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