There were many nights where I would run in a panic upstairs to sleep on the couch in the living room.  I had another nightmare or was startled awake by audible voices.  I was known by my family for being very sensitive and imaginative.  It didn’t take much to scare me.  And those nights running up the two flights of stairs to the living room were especially scary because I was sure something was following me.

Neither my parents nor I knew what to do with my experiences.  We didn’t know anything about defilement on land or how to deal with critters or any of the many things that we now understand about the spiritual realm.  So, I opted for an alternative solution, which was to turn off the sensitivity as much as I could.

Things did settle down for me quite a bit, though it took many more years before we did enough spiritual work to put an end to the nightmares.  But I did an excellent job (unfortunately) of disconnecting the nighttime experiences from the rest of my life.  I willingly embraced the idea that I didn’t really have that kind of discernment and so I didn’t see or hear things.

Yet, as I continued to grow in my spiritual journey, I felt more and more the sense that something wasn’t right.  The desire to see the spiritual realm started to grow.  My spirit knew I was made for it, and all my attempts to shut it down couldn’t completely silence the voice.  I carried that longing and sense of “I am supposed to be able to do this” for a couple of years until recently when I listened to the teaching by Arthur Burk called Developing Discernment.

The teaching gives a framework for different kinds of discernment and throughout the presentation Arthur validates those who operate in any of the five areas.  What stood out to me the most were the practical tools he shared for developing discernment in your everyday life.  It was at this point that I realized that now was the time to redeem and unpack this part of my design.

So, I went for it … with some amount of trepidation!  But one of the things that has been special in my relationship with God in this process is the building of trust.  I began with an act of my will to acknowledge that His design was good, and now I am beginning to believe it with my heart.

The tools work.  Over the last few months, my discernment has sharpened considerably.  I have been practicing discernment in a variety of ways and I am seeing and sensing things again.  I am building confidence that the gift does exist and it is not something to be afraid of.  One really fun point is that God is unpacking a particular niche of discernment that parallels a major part of my design.  And there is more peace in my spirit because I am not fighting a part of who God made me to be.

And frankly, I don’t know exactly where this road will lead!  I am the kind of person who has one foot in this world and the other across the threshold in another world.  I have a feeling that I am only scratching the surface so far.  But I am ON the journey now instead of refusing to take that bend in the road, and I know that God knows His business.

I wanted to share this story for anyone else who has had a negative experience with the gift of discernment.  For me, it has been a process of first accepting the good of what God has made and then actively pursuing the development.   The material presented in the album on discernment was a huge boost forward.  Arthur helped me see the value to the Kingdom and gave me a path to walk on to unpack it.

If you have not listened to the album before, I highly recommend it.  You can find it on the Sapphire Leadership Group website as a CD album or audio download.

Be free to be you!

Each of us has different areas of God’s nature that we connect with deeply.  Whether it is from our experiential walk or some pre-programming in our spirits, we resonate to that facet of Who He is.  The other day I had a conversation with a friend where I saw one of those areas clearly.

The topic of conversation was grief and suffering in our lives.  My friend made a comment about how can people survive in a world without God.  I agreed that it was a nightmarish proposition, but for me, it went beyond the comfort, hope, and strength He brings to our lives.  I simply can’t imagine, or perhaps, don’t want to imagine, a world where I am the biggest mind that exists.

I don’t understand God and I know I never will.  And somehow,  that is a huge source of joy and stability.  It is not intimidating to me, it is liberating.  The universe is far too complex and mysterious for my mind to grasp.  Why on earth would I want to grasp the God who made it?  That seems absolutely backwards and upside down; a cosmic proposition that is precarious to the max.

Still more horrifying is an incomprehensible universe with no God at all.  It feels like it would be the worst prison any spirit has ever known.  How many things about life must you deny and ignore?  How small must you shrink your mind?  Trapped inside of a world that has turned in on itself until you can only see your own reflection.  There is no freedom to revel in the awe of unexplainable and mysterious things.  They are dangerous.  They beg an explanation and explanations threaten to let the light shine on the prison walls.  What grieves me so deeply is that many people who have embraced this world view are deceived into thinking they are free.

I worship the God that is too big for me to understand.  It is one of the things I love the most about Him.  It is comforting to know He is in control, but even more so, to know that He is bigger than everything I can see.  That means I have the freedom to expand as big as I possibly can go in pondering the mysteries and I will never, ever, ever, find the end.

My friend and I began by discussing the grief and suffering in life.  And it is, indeed, pain and fear that usually cause us to reduce God or reject Him entirely.  But at the end of the day, would it not be better to accept that we are too small to understand than to have an understandable God, or worse yet, no God, in a world that doesn’t make sense?

Anyone who has submitted a creative work for critique can understand the emotional tug of war.  You have this precious creation you’ve poured yourself into.  Probably has some expressions of you that people don’t normally see.  Vulnerable.  It is your own creative flair.  A very personal thing.  And then comes the time when you hand your precious Mini-You over to someone to tell you what they like … or dislike about it.

You do it on purpose, believe it or not!  You know you’ve gotten too deep into it and a fresh perspective could inspire you to something great.  You need to hear how an idea lands on other ears, what you missed, where the holes are and which word you used 300 times too many.  You know you want to hear that stuff.  Sort of.

But how fickle we creative types are!  If someone comes back with TOO good of a report, we are immediately suspicious.  We look at them out of the corner of our eyes, not really believing that they liked it that much.  Surely there must be something wrong.  Did you actually READ it?

Thankfully, there are longsuffering friends and family, and heck, even strangers who are willing to put up with the bipolar nature of the creative mind, ignore our funny looks or groans of agony and tell us exactly what works and what doesn’t.  The Lord bless and prosper their tribe.

I am grateful to say that I have access to some members of this editorial tribe (otherwise known as people who are willing to share their opinion) and have embarked on the critiquing process for my book.  So far I have received some good input – particularly one idea that I had not even considered.  Right now it is in the hands of the next round of critiquers, one of whom has some professional editing experience.  That was a God thing!  I did not know it originally and God set it all up.  I am so grateful.  So far nobody has said that my book is “nice”.  That is encouraging.

What is also exciting about this stage in the process is that it means the manuscript is complete … well, loosely speaking.  I suspect there will be some more additions and subtractions before it goes to press.  But it is a big milestone to be this far in the process.

There is one person of the editorial tribe who will see the book next who has already told me what they will be looking for.  That could be the Week of Chocolate.  Lots and lots and lots of chocolate.

There are those moments in life when something you know in your head sinks down into your heart and lands with a “whump!” that reverberates throughout your whole being.  What you knew to be true, or what you repeated to yourself over and over again is suddenly something you can feel.  Many times these transitions sneak up on you, quiet, like the still small voice of God.  That’s how it was for me the other day.

My framework for life has been to respond to needs and desires.  So, you tell me what it is you need from me, and I will do my best to achieve it.  In more recent years I have come to see that there are design pieces wired in there and I do try to function in those areas.  But even so, I wait for a request.  The impetus comes from outside of me.  In my head I know that God made me with a specific set of gifts and I am to live according to that design, not to need.  That was all fine and good, but in my emotional view of life, it all still hinged on people outside of me.

Well, the pot has been boiling lately, thanks to a recent album release from Sapphire.  The teaching is called “Office of Personhood” and it is a gem.  This teaching addresses the issue of emotionally embracing that you are a Person, not just an entity that accomplishes things.  In Arthur’s words, a commodity.  Like a bar of soap.  Or a garden hose.

So, I have all these ideas stewing in my cooker, and something bubbled to the surface that I didn’t quite expect.  I went to the car wash the other day and stopped to vacuum all of Philip’s mess out of my back seat.  In the slot next to me was a Dad and his young daughter working on their SUV.  I caught the eye of the daughter a couple of times and smiled at her.  I started wondering what her life might be like, if she had good parents, what kinds of ideas were forming in her mind, and that sort of thing.  Then something strange began to happen.  I started thinking about what I could give her.  What do I have as an adult Christian woman?  What questions burning in her mind could I answer?  How could I give her a role model of what womanhood could be like?  What kind of fragrance could she pick up being around me?

WHOA, NELLY.

What on earth?  Nobody had asked me for anything.  She certainly wasn’t!  Now, maybe her spirit was.  I can’t deny the possibility.  But not a single word passed between us and she was more shy about my smiling at her than anything.  And here I was, all eager to give her gifts she hadn’t even dreamed of wanting.

Then came that little voice, slipping a crazy new thought into my head.  It was deceptively simple.  “I have things to give.”

Wait.  I have things to give.  Ok.  This is going deep, way deeper than it should for a sentence that seems to bear little difference to the concept I already had.  If I didn’t have something to give, then no-one would want anything, right?

Oh, but the difference is monumental.  Not only was a shift from head to heart, it was a massive emotional paradigm shift.  The impetus was no longer someone else.  It was me.  Intrinsically, in my essence, at my core, in all of my life’s experiences, I HAVE THINGS TO GIVE.

In the past, I waited for a request.  But it was even worse than that.  It also meant that I was continually trying to synchronize to the outside world of needs and wants.  Not that I tried to satisfy everything that came my way, but let me tell you, it is tiring to look outside first instead of inside first.  And it is awfully hard to maintain a stable sense of legitimacy in that context.  Like trying to tap dance in an earthquake.

It doesn’t matter if anyone needs what I have to give.  It doesn’t matter if they know about it or even want it.  It is wonderful to pair up need with design, but the status of the need doesn’t determine the status of the design.  That was the huge shift for me.  If I was stranded on a slab of volcanic rock in the middle of the ocean without even a shrub to sing to, I would still have things to give.

I know the shift is something that God has been building behind my back.   The teaching on personhood got the circuits crackling with more thoughts of freedom to enjoy being who God made me to be.  Now I can enjoy giving what He made me to give, in any size context He arranges.

At the end of the day, this has let off a geyser of joy in my spirit.  There is still lots to learn and develop in terms of the “how to”, but fundamentally, I now feel the truth of living out of design.  I think there is something of the joy of God that we can partake of here.  He gave massively out of His own essence to create a universe.  Nobody needed it.  There was nobody there TO need it!  He did it because He had things to give and it was His nature to give them.

So, I share this for all of you who are on this journey too.  Is your framework like mine was?  If you look at the “why” behind living out your design, is it because of what is in you or because of what people need?  Do you know this in your head or your heart too?  Do you have joy because you know you have something to give?

May you be blessed on the road of discovery and truth.  You, too, have things to give!