14 Sep Whitewater Ahead
What It’s All About
To attribute an experience like this to “being psychic” or having “a direct line with God” is to confuse things badly, missing what is crucial. This story is about relationship. Just about everything God does in our lives is to draw us into the tension of the collaborative relationship He is seeking with us.
For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.
Romans 11:36
This is picture from a series of images that I have created and call Lightborne. These illustrations help visualize the spiritual dynamics taking place in and around us, which determine how we experience God’s Presence. This graphic represents the relationship that God initiates with man. The slender upper arc of the ellipse represents God first moving upon us: as in giving me the dream, as in coaching me inwardly to refuse fear and to forcefully place the possibility of a future fire into His hands. Each of us is represented by the slender core of light to the left, quickened by Him to mirror His intention. The lower arc of the ellipse illustrates the completion of our collaboration with Him, which always ends in a glorious burst of exultation igniting His heart as well as our own.
This picture also illustrates faith, which always begins with God. Faith is the capacity to receive God’s power into our circumstances. It is not religion, but relationship—and He first moves upon us, in order to author faith in us.
The morning after the fire, as I curled up in my bedroom chair to have my quiet time, I turned to the passage of Scripture suggested by my devotional as the reading for that day. I had read those same verses innumerable times before, but that morning they sprang off the page with new meaning.
Heb 11:32-34
And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire. . .
No coincidence is accidental. Life is not random. Those verses were placed before me that morning so that I would understand what God was telling me, so that I could see what had taken place.
By faith, God through collaboration with me had quenched the power of fire. By giving me the dream that confronted me with my helplessness and ultimate lack of control, He quickened me (stirred me) to turn to Him trusting Him with the outcome. He moved on me in the way He wanted me to move with Him, wrapping the future in prayer. He was arousing me to that state of being that is faith. By faith, being in that state of fully trusting Him, I was able to receive His power into my circumstances—so that He could quench the power of that fire.