Africa Day 10

Still in Nairobi, Kenya. What a day. The team split up again. Judy and some of the team went to visit Brenda with Jacaranda Community to pray with Brenda and some of her girls.

Robbie, Michelle, and I went back to the ‘Increasing Your Capacity’ conference. The motivational speaker was there again. He spoke for about an hour and a half. He recapped his talk from the day before and then gave us some practical tips for how we could transform our thinking and doing. We learned the importance of purpose, motive, mindset, emotional state, networks, vision, and the cost of failure. He made many excellent points. If I were the president of a corporation, I would want to hire this man. But I don’t want to figure out my purpose or vision. I want God’s purpose and vision for my life. My work is to stay connected with God in an intimate relationship, learning how to listen and obey.

Michelle and I joined the motivational speaker and two other Kenyans for a panel discussion. I didn’t say too much; mostly I read scripture from Philippians 2: 1-5; 12, 13; and Jeremiah 17: 5, 6.

At the end of the morning, Dr. Ernest, one of the panelists spoke. He is a medical doctor who was called by God to be a hospital administrator in Kenya. He is opening up 100’s of medical clinics, and ultimately hospitals all over Kenya to provide low-cost, excellent medical care to the 93% of Kenyans who do not have health insurance and so must pay all of their care out of their pockets.

The best part of this story is the call of God, the sacrifices he made to follow God’s call, and the faith of this man. He is serving the physical needs of his people, but even more importantly he meets their spiritual needs. These clinics, which are not connected to the government, share the Gospel with everyone who walks through the door. What an incredible Christian outreach! It was a good way to end the day. Everything he does points to Jesus, involves Jesus.

We got back to the hotel at about 3:00 PM, ate a quick lunch, and returned to the conference venue for a night of worship. The evening opened up with a prayer that brought down the power of God. The worship group ushered us into the presence of God. Then Dr. Dennis got up to speak. The word ‘speak’ does not capture what happened next. I am not a good writer – I try to report the facts to give all of you a flavor of what Judy and I are experiencing so you can share this journey with us. But tonight something happened that words cannot adequately capture. We use words to communicate our experiences. Words have limits – they tend to put our actions and experiences into a box so our intellect, our minds, can grasp what happened. When we deal with the Spiritual, the ineffable, the luminous, words fail. I think that is why the writers of the Old Testament didn’t even try to describe God except to use a burning bush, a pillar of fire, a cloud, or images like that. They didn’t even give Him a name, except for Yahweh, and then would not pronounce it. We cannot bring God down to a place where our minds can grasp Him. He is Other.

And so I cannot really describe what happened when Dennis took the microphone and began to speak about Matthew 14:22-33. Even that sentence is inappropriate – Dennis was a conduit for something ‘Other’. This ‘Other’ that we call God or the Holy Spirit filled the room. The Unseen Real was all around us and within us. For over an hour we sat in the Presence of God – our minds were stilled, our hearts tuned to His heart. And then Dennis called people forward for ministry. When Dennis prophesied over them, power was released. I am sure that Dennis would object to this description. First, these are still mere words and therefore inadequate. Second,  it was not about Dennis. Someone had to be the conduit. Someone had to be used to bring what is unseen into the hearts of men and women. The presence of the Unseen is the real story. To point to Dennis is to limit the work of the One who was among us. The miracle was that through the scripture that Dennis used – the scripture about Jesus walking on the water toward the boat in the middle of the storm-tossed sea and Peter getting out of the boat and walking on the water to Jesus – God showed up; we were in the Presence of Almighty God. And not in some intangible way – His presence was palpable and real, although, as I said, ineffable (meaning “too great to be described in words” or “unutterable, not to be spoken” as in ‘the ineffable name of God’). We all sat in reverence and awe as God spoke and moved in our spirits and hearts transforming us. No one that evening left the venue the same as when they arrived. To say it was a powerful evening is an understatement (again, the inadequacy of words). I wish all of you could have been in that room with us.

Then Dr. Dennis called everyone forward for prayer and the team swung into action. Judy and I prayed with men, women and couples. All the team members prayed. And the Spirit of Christ poured out of us. One of the women Judy prayed for told Judy that her prayer confirmed 10 prophecys the woman had recently received.

I think that at its heart, tonight was the fundamental meaning of ‘releasing the Kingdom of God into the kingdom of the world’. I am learning. We cannot intellectually understand what happened this evening, we can only experience it. It is still real, but it is a different type of reality than the western mind is used to grasping. It takes a culture shift in your brain to realign how you look at the world. It is not enough to worship, as I understand worship from my cultural background. We must surrender all of our faculties to God. We must make room for Him in every part of who we are. We must be ok with not understanding. We tend to say “if I can’t understand a thing, it must not exist” or “if you can’t explain logically why you feel a thing, I will ignore you”. But God is ineffable. All I can say is that “I know that I know that I know” and let God take over my life in these moments. That is more than enough. That is the Kingdom of God.