My Hippie Artist Friend

“There are no 'if's' in God's world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety - let us pray that we may always know it!”
― Corrie ten Boom


     Yesterday, cancer kicked my ass and I don't even have it.  I feel guilty because a very good friend of mine is really struggling with the whole God thing while her husband is in pain, being eaten alive by cancer cells.  I should be there, sitting beside her.  I was when her brother was murdered years ago.  It didn't matter if it was the middle of the night or the middle of the work day, I was there for her.  Now my hands are so full.  At least they feel that way.  I pray.  That is all I can do.  I listen to how He wants me to pray and I pray.  That's all I can do. 
     As I was having this awesome day with God two days ago, I didn't know everything that was happening.  The Lord spoke to me with a message for a couple friends and it was amazing.  I had lunch with a new friend and I had dreams interpreted and lots of confirmations.  I was feeling so good, especially about me and God.  I love those days where you hear clearly and many answers come, but I think those ice cream cone from heaven days are from God, because He knows the next day you will be required to eat spinach, liver, and sardines. 
     I woke up Sunday morning with the glow of God's presence still on me when I got a text from my friend who has been clean for over 20 years and he asked how I was doing and informed me he woke with a Johnny Cash song on his mind,  Sunday Morning Coming Down.  I answered his text with the song I woke up with " Nothing but the Blood " on my heart.  Then he dropped the bomb: Of the three lymph glands they tested, two showed cancer.  I can't even write this without tears.  We have been fighting for a year and a half, throat, then prostate and now . . . and now the worst.   I am so tired and I am so pissed off at Satan for his pride.  I spent most of the day in bed, in tears, feeling beat up.  Cancer is kicking my ass and I don't even have it. 
     It is frustrating to watch the different battles and how they are playing out.  We prayed for a guy a couple weeks ago and he passed away.  I see one fighting with hundreds of people supporting him, because they have made him their God instead of the real one.  I can say that because at one time I did the same with him.  Now he is just one of my friends and was very important at one time, but if people don't put him in the right place, under God, just a pastor, the Lord will take him.  He told me that years ago when I was putting him before God, God said, "Don't make me take him out of your life, because I will."  He has.  I learned.  Too late.  Now it looks like we will not have time to be friends like we once were.  I love him and he saved my life.  I would give him a kidney if that's what it took to keep him alive, but God made it a brain tumor, cause you can't give away your brain and who would want it?  Ha. 
     Then there is my friend sitting with her husband.  I should be there.  I can't take it.  I know her family is nonexistent and that makes me feel worse.  I don't know how she is managing, but if yelling at me about our God helps, I am okay with that. 
     Then there is my friend that the Lord instructed me to give whatever he needs and I have been and would have even without instruction.  He is amazing.  A few times I have sensed anger.  A few times we have sat in silence hurting alone together.  He tries to cheer me up and rips my heart out.  I do not want to lose one of these people, but I would give up their friendship to save their lives, I would walk away forever if it meant they lived.  Then I have to look at the bigger picture.  What is God doing and not doing and why?
     From what I have learned about healing, I would be on my face asking God who I needed to go to and ask forgiveness from.  I bet the list would surprise me and maybe now would be a good time to start - before the disease of bitterness.  I hate cancer and that just may be where my bitterness lies. 
     So yesterday, I spent the day listening to his song.  Today, I am fighting for all of them again, through prayer.

 

 

And the one that reminds me of him.

 

Somebody Teach!!

“Our actions and attitudes in the chronos times of preparing, sowing, believing and persevering are what determine whether God can shift us into the kairos times of fresh and strategic opportunities.”
― Dutch Sheets, God's Timing for Your Life 


    Some days I am just stunned.  Being teachable is a big thing.  Knowing what you need to learn is another.  Let's take prayer for instance.  I have yet to go to a church that teaches how to pray.  There must be something to learn or the Bible wouldn't give instruction.  I remember hearing a man I know said that a friend of mine was praying just to be seen.  It cracked me up, because I know her.  When she starts praying the Holy Spirit takes over and she doesn't remember half of what she said.  The difference in the two people is the man who was accusing told me we have to control the Holy Spirit and the friend praying is totally submitted to the Holy Spirit.  It's a very sad difference. 
     I am listening to everything I can on prayer.  I want God to be able to use every word of my prayer.  I know Jesus is in the middle of this and we don't have to be perfect, but I still want every ounce of God working on the people I am crying out for.  What if my prayers just fall to the ground?  Can you imagine?  And I believe they do at times.  We are to pray in His will and a good way to check if we are doing just that is to check our motives, what do I want out of this?   The Lord has taken me off prayer patrol before for someone because of my heart.  It seemed my motives were pure, but they couldn't be because my heart wasn't.  That's why He had to give me a dream about my friend having a brain tumor almost a year before they were diagnosed.  Basically He was giving me authority to go after it. 
     I went to visit my friend a few days ago who had prostate cancer.  His stomach looks like a pin cushion.  I really didn't want to see it.  He looks like and feels like he weighs about 100 pounds.  When I hugged him I noticed bones I had never noticed before.  He was happy, at least he seemed happy with his checker board bandaged stomach and his pee bag tied to his leg.  This battle has been going on for a year and a half and I want to beat the cancer off him like a rabid dog having ahold of his leg.  I am tired.  Some days I can only pray in tongues and cry because I have no words left for God about this subject. 
     I was praying for a mentor the other day, "Lord God open their eyes and ears to you!" and I hear, "How's that working for you?"  What?  Huh?  "You have been praying that same prayer for 6 years for "D".  How did that work?"  Well doesn't that just put a speed bump in your prayer life.  Tongues is all I got.  I couple weeks ago the Lord had talked to me about forgiveness.  I was seeing the number 77 everywhere.  When I asked Him what He was trying to tell me, He said it meant forgiveness.  He wanted forgiveness toward the government for hiding cures for cancer and forgiveness toward doctors who use their patients to make money and so on.  I was going to gather a group to do this praying together when one day on my way to a friend's He asked why I hadn't forgiven.  I told Him I was getting a group together to pray for cancer . . .  and He said, "I asked you to forgive.  I didn't ask you to get a group.  I gathered a group and you are one of them."  I went right into prayer and forgave everyone and everything He brought to my attention.  
     I have been sick for the last couple weeks, first with sinus infection and then a stomach bug.  I was driving home the other night, completely exhausted and emotional.  I asked Him if any of my prayers were doing anything.  Talk about feeling negative.  Then I heard Him, "you weren't done."   I knew I had forgiven every thing and person He had said.  Then He whispered, "Forgive me."  Instant tears.  It was a knowing, I didn't have to go through the arguments of "But Lord You have done nothing wrong."  We both knew that, but I did have to forgive Him for allowing the cancer.  I went down my list of cancer fighting friends and forgave God for allowing them to be in this fight.  It has gotten easier to forgive Him over time, because I realize there is a good reason.  There is a Kingdom reason.  If He takes one person and it some how saves 10, they all win.  We get so stuck in an earthly view of life when it goes so far beyond the here and the now. 
     A while back I lost a friend to cancer.  He had leukemia.  He was in his eighties, but I really feel God used him as an example to me to get me through what was coming.  I went to the hospital almost every other day to pray with and for him.  He and his wife are very important to me.  I had asked them on several occasions to adopt me.  He would say in his ornery way, "No way.  I got enough trouble."  Then he would smile.  He was always asking if I needed anything.  Back in November of 2015 when I had a stroke he and his wife showed up at the hospital and with big ole tears in his eyes he handed me a rock with the word family on it and he said, "We have decided to adopt you."  We both cried.  Who knew months later I would be going to the hospital to pray for him. 
     The last time I saw him, he was very sleepy.  I had my granddaughter with me and we sat in the corner of the room and prayed quietly for him.   When I left I kissed him on the head and from somewhere in me the words came out, "We have your wife.  We will take care of her.  Don't you worry."  We both cried because that was God, not me.  I couldn't go back because I was fighting a bug and he died a week later.  Then God showed me a very important picture.  It was a tri-level chess board.  He often used a chess board to show me things about His strategy, but this was the first time it had three levels.  I watched as a huge hand reached down and took a piece from the first level and moved it to the top level.  I heard the words, "He may be on a different level now, but it's the same game." 
     A short time later, I was listening to a teaching by an intercessor I have much respect for and he was telling a story about his assistant who had passed.  He was crying out to the Lord and said, "How will I get things done without her?"  He said, "The Lord answered me and informed me she is working harder for me now than she ever has."  I believed his words because of what God had showed me with the tri-level chess board.  They aren't up there playing checkers and sipping on iced tea.  On a couple of occasions the Lord has reminded me of this.  How many are up there from our families, from our ministries, from places we have forgotten and they are praying and petitioning on our behalf?  I don't believe they are seeing every stupid thing we do here, but the belief that there are no tears, no pain, and no sin in heaven falls apart when you realize it was in heaven that one of God's top angels rebelled.  He also took a third with him when he got the boot.  That is sin, there had to be pain, and scripture confirms He weeps.  I guess that's why there will be a new heaven.
     In the last couple years God has moved several people to the third level of this game and I like to believe that every move is strategic.  Maybe a person can do more for the Kingdom there than he is doing here.  Maybe moving somebody we depend on up to the third floor forces us to be who He made us to be.  I had a friend ask me yesterday when we were talking about a mentor, "what if you walked into that situation being who God created you to be?"  Well . . . well, in a perfect world?  Ha.  His thinking is so far above our thinking.  If you are not fulfilling your purpose here, you may be relocated for the sake of souls.  Purpose?  Purpose.  I can't remember where I was going and what I was going there for, but as I drove I was talking to two friends on speaker.  I asked them for prayer and as they prayed for me and I listened and agreed, I noticed that among all the gray and white clouds in the sky there was one that was bright pink.  It happens here often as the sun goes down, but this was just one cloud, and that was odd.  I said out loud to my friends, "There is a cloud that looks like a dolphin."  Immediately I heard the Lord, "That's a porpoise.  What is your porpoise, Kayleen, what is your porpoise?"  My purpose Lord is to teach people to hear your voice and that is what I will do. 


“Why is it,” comedian Lily Tomlin asks, “that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” Such a response from ourselves or others to someone’s claim to have heard from God is especially likely today because of the lack of specific teaching and pastoral guidance on such matters.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God  

 

Outhouse, Closet or Shack, He Will Find You.

“Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.”
― William Paul Young, The Shack    


      For the last several weeks I have been in a place I have never been before. I would guess our walk, if we are actually moving ,should always feel like this.  I am not even sure how to explain this place, except that maybe my pain is all that is holding me together.  I know less than I have ever known.  God, Jesus is a subject different than any other.  If I was learning about fixing an engine, each week I am sure I would know more, but with the subject of the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and God the more time I spend learning the less I know.      
     Let's take the subject of cancer alone.  I have several people in my life fighting cancer right now.  Two of them are very important to me.   One is a friendship of 23 years.  He gets parts of me that no one else does.  Creativity is what we have in common and practically the only thing, but his friendship is very important to me.  Sometimes I feel he is the only proof that I have changed.  He knew me when.  Though he no longer has throat cancer, he will have surgery to remove prostate cancer and the affects could be life changing.  Some days the pain I feel for him is more than I can express.  As he struggles to believe in a God that I hold hands with even as we share and laugh at our struggles. 
     I worked with a woman for 7 years at my last job and we became good friends.  Then I changed, I found Christ and I am not the same person and though I love her as much as ever, she doesn't believe it.  Her husband has the "C" and is in a lot of pain.  As I stood in the Healing Rooms where I volunteer and people are set free from cancer, unforgiveness and uneven limbs, I receive a text from her and though they are only words on a small screen I can hear her screaming them "I am going to go crazy and kill.  Who is this God you talk about?  The higher power that is hurting us so bad?  I have prayed for my husband to not have this pain, but you know what??  He doesn't hear me.  I am just poop, yeah that's me shit.  It doesn't pay to be a good person.  I wish I would have just died on the street."  As I stand there holding Jesus' hand and feeling her pain and feeling totally helpless I have learned not to let go, but to hold on tighter or the world's pain will take me down.  What do I do?  I invite them to come to the Healing Room.  I feel small.  I hurt.
    Then there is the big one.  Our relationship is odd.  He saved my life when nobody else had time.  He stayed and he prayed and sometimes he dragged me through the muck of life to show me a God I was raging at.  He cleaned me up and held my hand, while He held God's hand and prayed one day I wouldn't need him in the middle.  The day came.  Finally.  When I watch my granddaughter at a year old I see me.  She plays by herself, going from one thing to the next and then suddenly has to find mom.  She doesn't need anything, just to know mom is there and she can continue in her play without a worry.  I have done that in this relationship.  I wander off, grow up a little, but always have to check in at some point.  It's been the strangest 6 year relationship with more offs than ons, but when I learned of an inoperable brain tumor taking his life I went numb.  I couldn't tell you how I felt.  As I sat in worship at the Healing Rooms one day, my new mentor put it in perspective.  It feels like you are losing a parent.  I don't like the term but for lack of a better one, he was my first spiritual father, but it was more of a big brother.  I always wanted a big brother and that was the only reason I could open up to him and eventually Jesus.  
    So as though these three are not enough there are more.  Not nearly as close to me, but I pray for them regularly.  A couple days ago a friend asked if we would go to her nephews house with stage four liver cancer and pray for him.  As I am driving to meet my prayer warrior partner for the day, I begin the battle.  Lord, go ahead of us and prepare his heart.  That was as far as I got before my feelings came to the surface.  WHAT AM I SUPPOSE TO SAY TO THESE PEOPLE??  What are we even doing here?  So I pray for his liver to heal and I pray for the brain tumor, and does it do any good?  Is it up to you or is it up to them?  And then it hits me, WHY am I praying for them?  They get to go be with you and leave me here to do the hard work.  They should be praying for me.  Then I laughed.  I know it's not funny, but really, who is better off?  So I go through this cycle of laughing and crying and praying and screaming and wondering and repenting and believing and not believing and asking and telling and laughing and crying . . . and so on . . . and more.  Then He shows up. 
     When God shows up it is different every time.  This day I catch glimpses as He stays mostly out of sight at first.  But then I see Him clearly as my friends son (11 years) says I want to go pray with you guys.  He even states that this man will be healed.  That's a glimpse of God.  We talk about God and the awesome stuff He is doing around us as we drive the short distance to the house.  And as we sit with this man so wrecked by cancer that his skin color is nothing I have ever seen before, the Holy Spirit dances in between and around us setting the atmosphere in the room.  Three sisters and a young man he has mentored and a few others gather with us as we wait to see how God moves.  For privacy for the family I will only say, God blows my mind all the time.  Ministry never looks like I think it will look.  Healing isn't always what I think it should be. 
     This morning I read several posts online about "The Shack".  I am so sick of the boxes we shove Jesus in.  When I first read the Shack it destroyed my God boxes.  I am so tired of religious people telling me what I should watch as they do their Holy Yoga and play with their idols.  I don't do boxes.  Jesus does not do boxes.  What does healing look like?  You can never say.  If anyone of these three cancer battles ended in a death and like Elijah with the widows son, would their families trust God enough to allow someone to lay across their family members dead body?  If I walked into a hospital room where the body lay would anyone (in their right mind by the worlds standard) allow me to lay across the body three times and believe me when I told them their loved one would be revived?  Who don't you believe??  ME?  JESUS?? 
     If I hear one more time that Jesus is not an overweight black woman I will throw up.  Are you kidding me?  He is all things.  When I went into intense ministry to heal from the wounds of sexual abuse and trauma, Jesus showed up to me as a little jungle boy.  He looked just like Mowgli from the Jungle book.  WHY?  Because that was all the more I could trust Him.  As I healed and grew He grew with me.  Now Jesus shows up as a grown man.  Who are you or anyone to tell me what Jesus looks like?  He meets us where we are.  Mowgli looking Jesus met me in my closet.  There were many times as I walked through difficult moments in my healing that I would get a glimpse of a Mowgli looking Jesus in strange diaper looking garb, waving in a Forest Gump way and His smile alone would heal parts of my heart I didn't know were damaged.  Go ahead and climb in your box and wait for Him.  He showed up for me in a closet, but He never allowed the door to close behind Him.


“I often find that getting head issues out of the way first makes the heart stuff easier to work on later.”
― William Paul Young, The Shack