I am so behind.

I desperately need to maintain some sense of regularity with my blog posts.  Otherwise I'm not going to be able to keep up with everything that happens.  Lord help me. 

So last night was absolutely incredible.  Heidi Baker, an amazing missionary who founded Iris ministries spoke at Bethel's Sunday evening service and the word she spoke just wrecked me.  First of all, when you  look at Heidi, you see pure love and joy oozing out of her eyes.  She has truly captured the heart of Father God and moves to the rhythm of His heartbeat.  Her ministry watches over 10,000 orphans, and they've planted over 7,000 churches in the past decade.   Impressive numbers, but even if you had no knowledge of the incredible statistics of her ministry, you could know the love in her heart just by looking at her.  It's incredible. 

So basically, liquid love in a person was preaching.  To sum up, her message was about stopping for the one.  Recognizing the needs of those who are starving not only physically, but spiritually.  4.4 billion people on the Earth are starving spiritually because they have not heard the good news of the Gospel of Jesus.  That's our mission.  Not to necessarily make it our goal to reach all 4.4 billion of them, but to simply stop for the one in our everyday lives. 

At the end of her message she had everyone kneel down on the floor and invite Holy Spirit to come.  She shared a vision she had, which I can't remember in its entirety ( a side effect of waiting to blog about it).  Basically she saw chariots of fire going around the world.  Two people (believers) were in each chariot and God was holding the reigns of each chariot.  He was holding the reigns, as opposed to the riders because each person needed both hands to hold a sword that they possessed.  The sword stood for mercy and justice. 

As a prophetic act, she asked everyone to kneel, hold up with both hands their sword, and ask that God would show them people He wanted them to reach.  She declared over us that God was showing us faces, places, nations, people that we were called to reach.  For a while now, I've had this desire to go to China because the greatest revival in history is happening there right now.  So I immediately felt a drawing to China.  I felt God say that, "Too long has China been associated with dragons."  God apparently has big plans for China.

Pretty cool, but when I arrived home, it got better. 

Last week, my house dad Daniel went around asking if anyone wanted this plastic sword that he had.  Now for whatever reason I just like swords, and he was going to throw it out otherwise.  So I said that I would take it.  I had a feeling that it would have some sort of prophetic meaning eventually and I turned out to be right.  So anyway I kept it in my room by my bedside, not really getting any super divine revelation from it.  In fact, most of the time when I left the house I would just completely forget about it. When I came home from the Sunday night service though, I saw my housemate John playing with my sword.  He decided to point out something obvious to me that I, up untill that moment never realized.  There's a dragon on the hilt of my sword!  The word God spoke to me instantly came to memory.  What God spoke to me prophetically as I held up my sword on Sunday night, He confirmed with my physical sword which I received a week earlier.  Needless to say, my mind was blown.  

God really does speak.  He's always speaking.  Listening is the key.  Listening and expecting to hear His voice.  One of the pastors here said something so true one Sunday morning before worship.  "Expectations are the only things that can kill faith."  By lowering our expectations of what God is going to do, we automatically lower our faith level.  Now it's hard for the one who has never heard the voice of God before, because they have no experience to draw faith from.  Hard, but not impossible.  And even if it was "impossible," that word is not in God's vocabulary.  It has no meaning in the realm where He is, and it certainly has no power.  God will speak to those who wait and listen.  And He will do it in ways that you would never imagine.  Case in point, my 2 dollar plastic sword, no doubt from either Party City or Wal-Mart.  Just listen.  He loves to speak to His children! 

So God's put it on my heart to go to China.  How that's going to happen, your guess is as good as mine.  But God gives you the desires of your heart for a reason.  There's a reason I feel so attracted to China.  It might be years before I can act on that, but whenever it happens, I am for sure bringing my dragon sword with me!