― 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
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