Prayer Room #7 - Weakness

“I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children;yes, Father, for such was Your gracious will”. Luke 10:21

O Father, how wise You are! For You in your wisdom chose the children to shame the wise. You chose the weak, wounded, small, ugly, unorthodox, awkward, dirty, and meek to overpower the strong and proud. Thank You! You are showing me more and more Your perfect leadership. You destroy the self confident and self satisfied. You chose the broken for children. The ones with nothing to offer the world but pennies. In a world where inner posture doesn’t matter you counted it the most worthy. The weak and broken cannot rely on themselves. The ragamuffins and invisible are Your children. You are so great! If all we hold onto is You, we can’t be shaken. We have no wealth, no glory, nothing valuable in the eyes of this world. How blessed we are! For in my emptiness, in my unworthy state, in my tears and hopelessness, we look up and see first Your eyes. Your beautiful eyes looking straight into us, piercing our hearts, blowing past our barriers. Your eyes full of compassion and light. How Your eyes grip our very heart. Desiring, compassionate, inviting, satisfying, blazingly jealous gaze. And if we weren’t already undone by Your look, we suddenly see Your arms open wide. Open! Beckoning us in! Dirty and nothing to offer You. You still have Your arms open. You know what is best for us. Our complete satisfaction is found in Your gaze and embrace. You are completely glorified when we are utterly satisfied! Our satisfaction, our true satisfaction cannot be found outside of You! So thank You Father! Thank You for breaking me open last night and pouring out my pent up tears. It hurt so bad but you never left me! After I said everything and anything I could to get You to leave. I still looked up and found myself in Your arms. True loves gaze blowing open the doors to my soul. I love You Fahter. I love You Jesus. You are worthy of everything I have. Everything I can give. Take it all! Come Lord Jesus! Come and claim Your inheritance! Come and claim Your weak and broken son! I desire to have You over every weak and broken facet of my life. Don’t stop! Intensify! Holy Spirit do not relent until You break and set ablaze every passion, thought, desire, and love that is not from You. You desire all of me! So take me! I want You! O mighty lover of my soul come claim Your bride. Lead me down the perfect path. I trust Your leadership! I trust You! I love the Son because He shows me the Father! Abba, I desire You. Come quickly!

Prayer Room #6 - Honesty

So yesterday the “Honeymoon” ended and You showed me that I still have many deep issues and problems. Thanks! Haha. Lord, I will never leave You. I desire You. But I am in constant need of You. Help me Father! Whatever it takes, pull me onward toward deeper and deeper revelations of you. Enlarge this heart of mine. How can I fully experience You with this small, hard heart. Soften my heart. Tenderize my heart to receive the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. (I took another break from journaling here and took some time to pray).

If I appear as anything besides weak, confused, and broken then forgive me. For I am a weak and wounded man; with questions in His heart from his youth. I find that the simplest childhood questions are still begging for an answer. What is love? Are you happy with me? Do I have what it takes to make it in this world? Why weren’t you there? Why was I hurt? Why am I still scared? Why did you let my family suffer? Will this wound ever be healed? All these questions have answers in Your word. I believe Your word. So why am I still wounded with a heart contorted with offense and fear. If you desire the weak and wounded Father, here I am. Can a heart be as twisted as mine to run away from and pursue You? To love and despise You? To understand nothing yet in my pride display a mask of intelligence? To put on a mask of joy while my heart is raging inside my chest? With the same mouth I sing praises about You and question Your goodness. I am sick on the inside Father. Can’t You see my pain? I want to be whole Father. I want to just pretend that this hurt doesn’t exist. That I have what it takes to gain healing. My words mean nothing. I am full of lies and partial truths. Destroy me Father. I’m not even worth Your continual look of love. A vow of authenticity? I made a vow to hide behind a distorted display of faked goodness. I give advice on pain when I don’t know how to identify and fix my own. I advise people on matters which my own heart still struggles with. I am a fake. A fraud. Here I sit in a room dedicated to the authentic pursuit of you. Here I sit condemning myself with my feelings. O how I hurt Father. I hurt because I fake happiness. I hurt because I know nothing. I hurt because I’m the same kid 13 years ago. Full of fear, pain, and confusion. Loving to pretend that I belong somewhere. Running from the same wounds. Desiring someone to tell me it’s going to be okay. Longing for You to tell me it’s okay. O God I have tried finding you there. In that moment. I don’t see You. You are the only One who can heal my brokenness. I’m here Jesus. Still wounded. (More prayer and meditation)

I’m settling this once and for all Jesus. I love you Lord. Those words mean I care for you deeply. They mean I am willing to die for Your name because You are worth it. I want to spend time with You. I love spending time with You. You bring me Joy. You satisfy me. I love you so much God. I truly love You. Take Your rightful place as King in my life. I take pleasure in Your leadership. How you make me smile. Even when the feeling isn’t there, I know You still love me. You do not and will not change. You will never hurt me. You only have good in mind for me. You delight in me. I want to glorify you with everything I am. I want to step into the fullness of freedom and Joy in You. I cannot heal myself. I can’t do anything apart from You. It frustrates me that I’m so helpless. It frustrates me that I can’t fix it. Why couldn’t I fix the divorce? I never wanted to feel helpless again. Even when displaying weakness it wasn’t true weakness because I was still in control. Take the control. Take it Father. I’ve been trying to fix things in others lives because I couldn’t fix the divorce. I’ve been trying to defend others because I couldn’t defend myself. I can’t fix people. It’s not my job to defend everyone all the time, every second. Thank you Jesus for loving me. Thank you for this healing journey. Holy Spirit bring to the surface any offenses I have. So that I may walk with You in healing. Continue bringing me into freedom. I desire You Father. I love Your Son. Teach me to trust Your leadership. I need You. Make me dependent.

Prayer Room #5 - Depravity

 So these next few posts are going to give you a view into my weak and wounded heart.  I am pretty brutally honest with how I was feeling.  I almost don't want to post these next few blog entries because of how vulnerable I am in them...  But praise God for healing! 

Father, I am broken, wasted, dirty, wicked, and perverse.  I admit I don’t know the next step.  Turns out the one thing you were pointing to in my life is the very pipeline of waste I’ve been hiding.  You have opened the pipeline Father.  All my wickedness, perverse thoughts, and offenses towards you came spewing up.  I am freshly reminded about past sins and emotions buried deep.  You have pulled me back to the past and now I stand covered in it.  All the hatred, lust, confusion, utter sadness and hopelessness, darkness, etc.  I am covered in it.  I can’t get it off of me.  I hate being helpless.  I hate You breaking through my masks and facades.  Lord, I desire step “Z” in this process and I am still struggling with step “C”.  How many more unforeseen wounds do I carry?  How much baggage am I still holding onto?  I desire to know and feel You vividly in my life, but does it have to hurt like this?  Why do you have to remind me that I still don’t know what true love is.  That I still have heavy emotional blocks in my life.  Have I got so good that I fool even myself when I feel emotions?  Lord, I desire to truly feel what I’m meant to feel.  To not hide my true heart and emotions any longer.  Oh Father have your way.  I am already drained and emotionally burdened, take it all.  Please Jesus take this weight, I cannot bear it any longer.  I want to be free.  Free from my inability to cry/fear.  Free from feeling like you shouldn’t/won’t bless me.  Free from being incapable of loving for fear of being rejected again.  Free from manipulation, impure thoughts, and fake versions of me.  Loose these chains Father.  Jesus bring freedom.  I desire to press on in this journey into deeper and deeper levels of intimacy with my Beloved.  I don’t just want head knowledge of You.  I want You Father.  I want You Jesus.  I want You Holy Spirit.  So please Father, continue stripping off the layers that bind me.  I cannot bear them any longer.  Free me.  I cannot pretend that I can fix me any longer.  Help me. Help me.

Prayer Room #4 - Faith

    So God placed on my heart another area to wrestle with.  He is so faithful to give a desiring heart things to ponder and meditate upon.  Let me give you a little background information.  Yesterday, all the Track 1 interns got prophesied over.  It was a new experience for me because I have never been prophesied over before.  There was one prophecy that stuck out to me and is still hard for me to swallow.  My core leader Cameron came and sat by me and told me that he prayed and asked God about me, and what God gave him floored me (with doubt and questions haha).  He proceeded to tell me that God showed him an image of me as Elijah, calling down fire from Heaven. That God would be forming me into a great man of faith. (which is funny because right now I am filled with so much doubt).  That God would use me to turn the hearts of the sons to the father, and the hearts of the fathers to their sons.  I want to confess that many emotions are flooding through my mind about this.  First, how entirely unworthy I am that God has this plan for me.  Right now I admit that I am a man full of doubt and scared to give control of everything to a God so wild.  Oh how His goodness overrides those feelings, but I am still scared.  Holy Spirit I barely know Your voice, how shall I call down fire and be led by You.  How does one communicate with the Holy Spirit?  Is it the right words?  The right gestures?  No, I believe methods have no place with God.  Just because God moves at a certain place and time doesnt' mean He only works through that place and at that time.  God and Jesus have proven that there is no method to His power being displayed.  To one deaf man He spoke healing, to another He placed His fingers in His ears and healed him.  To one blind man He touched his eyes, to another He spit and made mud.  For Moses to part the Red Sea he raised His staff, for Elijah and Elisha they threw down there cloak.  God is not about method, He is about the heart. (At this point I put down my journal and did some meditating and thinking.  God pretty much rocked my paradigm of faith before I started writing this next part that night).

     Faith is so GOOD! "...Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea', and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, It will be done for him.  Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours" Mark 11:22-24  Can I just say that it is so much better to believe than doubt?!  I read that verse and took it to heart when praying for healing over two people.  I believe that they got healed!  i don't know if I can go back.   How my spirit jumped with Joy when I placed my faith and believed that they were healed.  It puts into sharp focus everything else I can't see.  God's plan for my life, healing, prophecy, the Holy Spirit moving and working, God's leadership.  O How I am moved with such Joy!  Such freedom!  I believe that You are a POWERFUL God!  Full of mercy and steadfast love and faithfulness.  Because of these promises I can step out in faith and believe!  I believe without seeing, without knowing, by disregarding logic.  Increase this fervency!  Place the very things You desire on my heart!  So that I would ask and You would grant Your servant approval in these matters! Amen