Can you up the prayer ante, please.

...and having done all, to stand. ~ Ephesians 6:13It can be hard sometimes to decide what to share here.  We're a diverse bunch & we don't always see stuff eye to eye & sometimes in the heat of the moment people forget to speak the truth in love ~ especially if our church tradition conflicts with another church tradition, so it was really nice yesterday to put all the angst on the back burner & just sit on the sidelines yahooing for my boy, Dino, playing his cricket finals on the island. Heaven alone knows what the other team, all muslim, thought of the beer swilling islanders [no, not me; I stick to yahooing] shouting encouragement to their cricketers.  I certainly heard from one or two of the islanders what they thought of the muslims using the lunch break to face Mecca & pray.  Not repeatable.  The heathens won.  I think we are still celebrating.




You have all been following along, haven't you?  You remember that I made gurgling noises about prophecy & even gurglier noises about speaking & ended up creating another blog just so I could gurgle in peace. And I only did it because I felt the Lord leaning on me really hard.  But it's ok.  It's quiet over there.  No~one talks to me.  Very few people even read over there & it's all good.  That's the Lord's business, you know.  I just gotta put up what he tells me & I try to be quiet about it over here because in all honesty some of what I've been seeing is downright terrifying ~ so lunacy making in fact that the Lord's gone to rather great pains to make sure I know I'm not the only one seeing this stuff & that other's with far more street cred are seeing the same things.

And I was paddling along nicely. Calm is good in this house.  I have 5 kids.  I already have all the chaos I can handle.  I had almost forgotten, almost but not quite, a conversation I had back with the Lord months & months ago ~ back when I started up that other blog because the Lord was talking & I had no~one to talk to about what He was talking to me about ~ & the conversation went something along the lines of: Well, Lord, you know I am never ever going to initiate this stuff so if you have a message & you want it spoken you are going to have to get someone to ask me.  That was my fleece.  I'm so pleased Gideon was an insecure man.  It makes me feel heaps better.

I happily prayed & wrote my little messages & checked occasionally to see if anyone had anything to say but mostly they didn't & I'm ok with that ~ & then it came.  The invitation I never really expected to get.  I missed it the first time because I didn't recognise the format it came in but the 3rd time ~ well, unmistakable is the word that comes to mind. And I am not a happy little vegemiter.

It is none of the things you might expect.  I do not melt down about having to stand before a crowd of strangers & speak.  I do not suffer stage fright, whatever it looks like.  By the time we've got that far I am really sure about what God's got to say.  I'm a Quaker; I accept women's ministry.  Nope.  I just know, that everything's going to hit the fan & explode all over my life in a smelly, smelly mess.  It's already started ~ & I'm not the warrior sort.  I just want to pick up my metaphorical skirts & run for the hills.

Nothing is set in stone yet.  It may yet fall in a wet miserable puddle but the stuff's already hitting the fan & I'm just gob~smacked every single time. It's not like I'm some sort of brilliant super Christian ~ just your usual messy inadequate sort doing their best to walk with Jesus. My little house of cards is wobbling badly ~ but I have the message ~ or at least the first bit of it & some idea of the general direction.

If you belong to the *no women in the pulpit* brigade ~ please, take it up with the Lord, don't rant at me.  This is not my idea & quite bluntly I've always wondered how Jonah managed to defy the Lord under the weight of the Holy Spirit's conviction because that is something I just can't manage myself.  I may be a little slow of hearing but once I'm sure the Lord's said, "Jump!" I'm a~hopping all over the place. So can you pray please, for me ~ & especially for Liddy.  Some days I just get so tired of standing plonk in the middle of a war zone.