Back to School

Today was my first day back to school after Thanksgiving break. Texas was awesome and wonderful, I had a great conversation with Aron about our covenant relationship and he entirely reciprocated all my feelings. We will most certainly be in touch with each other for the rest of our lives.
Today was a very special day of school for me, for the next 3 weeks the school will be breaking up into smaller groups a couple days of the week and every student is going to preach a ten minute sermon. This morning I was one of 5 who preached. It was an amazing experience and, even though it certainly was not perfect, I know that I did well. I taught on the scripture 1 Corinthians 3:21 "So then let no one boast in men, for all things belong to you." Essentially I said that we should have no divisions or competition in the church between denominations. No one person or group is special above anyone else, every Christian has it all. Life is really good.

Renewal of the Mind with some back story

Wow, God just laid a heavy revelation of myself on me, in a good way. It is going to take some explaining to get you up to speed with where I am at though.
A huge part of my life and my being is the hunger and pursuit of the miraculous, and I am talking the real miraculous. Healing miracles are cool, and I love them, but what really gets me excited is are bonafide crazy miracles. Levitating, walking on water, summoning objects out of nothing, these are the things that I am passionate about. This is one part of the back story.
The other part is that I been an avid gamer for most of my life, for mostly the same reason. See, I really like power, it is exhilarating. Doing miracles has that feeling and, to a lesser extent and as a semi-counterfeit, so does playing video games. Anyway, when I play video games I mostly play war games, games that centre around destruction and killing.
These two things come together in my present experience. Just moments ago I was reading the Bible and I started to feel the power of God in and on me. Almost like I became supernaturally energized, kinda like being manic or that sort of thing. I began to imagine the power of God flowing through me and manifesting and the automatic image was me "force pushing" the desk in front of me and causing some massive damage to the room. All of a sudden I hear God's voice say to me quite sternly, "Your mind has been affected by the video games you have played to love destruction, I am changing your mind, from now on you will love to build up and bring life instead of destruction."
It is all rather mystical and un-provable, so I do not say it supposing that any skeptics will believe it, but I knew that I had to record the experience and I decided to let you in on it. I will get back to you on whether things actually change in my mind or not. Praise Jesus Christ for His salvation!

Enroute to Great Friends

As I write this I am sitting in the San Francisco airport, waiting for my flight to Houston, then to Dallas, Texas. There I will be spending my Thanksgiving break with a good friend named Aron Philips and his family. Aron was in 1st year at BSSM with me last year and we really connected. He is one of a couple people that I think I have a covenant relationship with. What that means to me is that I have decided to keep in connection with Aron for the rest of my life. If he were to ever need my help or input with something I would do my best to help him. I have covenanted in my heart to stand beside Aron in whatever he pursues in his life. It is not something I hope to get from the relationship, but something I really want to give. Best case scenario I look back when I am 80 and see that I have helped Aron in some way to achieve his life dreams. If at that time he has helped me reach mine, then so much the better, but that is not why I decided on this covenant. Because I know that God is going to put people in my life who are going to want to lay down their lives to serve the vision God has given me, I get to do the same for others without need of return. My hope in life is to gain upwards of 5 of these relationships that I can really pour myself into, people spread around the world that I will always have connection with. There are so many great, great men and women who are going to change the world in very substantial ways, I know I cannot help all of them, but I will connect with and help a few. God made us to be in community He made us to love one another like He loved us, that means loving sacrificially, beyond just an emotion. There is another friend I have from England that I have covenanted with named Adam Heather. I am willing to give years of my life just to serve the vision he has. I do not even know what that vision is yet, but I know that he is a man worth serving. God is good, He is going to provide for everyone of our needs, wants, and desires. We can give of ourselves to others with no worry for our own well being, we get to give.

Life is normal, and wonderful

Well, nothing spectacular has happened in the last four days, sorry, nothing spectacular has happened to me, that I can report on. God has been doing some awesome stuff through some friends though, just today they prayed for a lady with shooting pains going down her leg and she got completely healed. But anyway, I suppose that you will have to be satisfied with an update of all the things I've been up to.
On Tuesday I went to my first mission trip meeting. In March I am going to Mozambique with 19 others. We are going to be staying at a orphanage/mission base of an international organization called Iris Ministries, you should look them up they are amazing. We are going to be ministering to the orphans and the missionaries there, having a party and loving like we never have before. I am really excited about it. (If you feel the urge to give towards said trip you can do so online at ibssm.org)
On Wednesday I met with my group in the International Transformation track. Our mission this year is to help an organization in Iraq to organize a youth conference in Kurdistan this July. Yesterday we met to do intercession for Iraq and made some prophetic cards for the youth that will be there. This is something else that I am incredibly excited about. I may end up going down there for the conference this summer as well.
Today I went on Community Activation and handed out flyers for a block party in a couple weeks. Had a great time talking and praying with people. My team is absolutely amazing and this activation is one more thing that I am incredibly excited about.
So, even though I have not recently seen any really cool miracles, I am loving life, probably more than I ever have before. Ah, God is so good.

Stability Wanted

Last night I had a very interesting time whilst at church. On Sunday nights Bethel has two different services, one at the main campus that has the usual schedule, worship and sermon with ministry time after, and another at what is called the "Twin View Campus" that is essentially 3 hours of music and dancing in worship of God. I was at the Twin View service. The music was great and everyone was really engaged, but I had a really hard time of it for most of the night. The reason for this requires some explaining. Recently I have been struggling through the idea that God does not actually require my worship, He is quite pleased to have me in my entirety and I do not have to a single thing on top of that to please Him. This is a very different paradigm than the one I had before where I felt like I had to fulfill my quota of singing/dancing before I would even be able to feel His pleasure. This has been a yearlong journey, but I am still working through it. Anyway, because of these conflicting ideas of fulfilling my responsibility and not having a responsibility to fulfill, last night became a bit of a roller-coaster of emotion. At no matter what I was doing I was questioning whether I was doing the right thing, if I was sitting in my chair peacefully praying (or almost falling asleep) I would wonder if God was wanting me to be up and dancing, or if I was up and dancing I would wonder if I was dancing because that was my chosen form of worship or if I was just doing it because that was what was expected of me. In hindsight I suppose I was over-thinking the whole thing a little to much, but it is hard not too because I am trying to figure out my standpoint on the whole issue.
By the way, while I was at Twin View God showed up at Bethel in what's called a 'glory cloud.' There was a physical cloud of smoke, feathers, and flakes of different coloured 'gold dust.' It was all pretty intense from what I heard, I have not seen it myself yet but I will certainly give my own account of it when I do, I may even capture it on camera. God is just crazy.

A Couple Miracles

Being a second year student at Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, I have the opportunity to be part of the ministry teams that pray for people after church services. Last night I saw two really cool things happen when I was praying. The first was a man who had a deviated septum in his nose, essentially the middle piece of cartilage was off to one side and was blocking one of his nostrils, it had been for years if I remember correctly. Anyway we prayed for a couple minutes and the septum actually moved! By the end of our praying he told me that it was a solid 25% better and he could breathe through both nostrils, God actually moved his septum! The other miracle was a guy with Parkinson's, as far as I am aware Parkinson's is a degenerative disease that slowly does bad things to your body. After we prayed the guy felt the presence of God through tingling in his chest and hands and he could walk normally. Before he came fro prayer we was dragging his feet but after he was lifting both legs with no issue. I really feel like the power of the sickness was broken last night and from now on it will regenerative instead of degenerative. Praise the Lord!

Back into the swing of things

Hello beautiful people,
I am blogging again, finally sat myself down to really do it. Pretty much this year has been the most amazing of my entire life. I love it and I love every part of it.
I moved back to Redding, California on September 1st into a community called Clay St., one of the lower income areas of Redding, just down the road from my girlfriend, Helen Smidrød. It's an amazing relationship that I could write pages and pages about, but that's not what this blog is for.
Since coming back to school here at Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry I have come into a few different positions of leadership. The foremost is my role as one of four 2nd year leaders for a community outreach. We pretty much go to this specific area every week and build relationship with the people there, praying for them, talking with them, listening to their issues etc. I have a fun story from that. Last week when we went out we encountered a lady and I asked her if she had any pain that she wanted prayer for. She said that she had pain in her toes because her shoes were too small. I explained to her that it was really easy for God to make shoes bigger and I know that because I have seen him make legs grow longer, and if He'll do it for legs He can do it for shoes. When she heard this she decided that she wanted to be taller as well so we sat her down in a chair and prayed for her legs, one at a time. First I commanded her left leg to grow and (after a couple tries) she felt a tingling sensation and, when I measured her legs together, her left leg was almost a centimetre longer, then I had her pray for her other leg and after she commanded it to "Grow, grow, grow" she felt a tingling sensation in that leg too and it became even with the left one. Now, I am just as skeptical as anyone else about these things. I have had times when it was all hyped up people actually just shifting around there hips and it looked like it changed but really didn't, but this time was legit. We prayed for her toes after and the pain left for a bit (came back with a vengence by the next week) and for her baby, who was teething, the baby got healed and stayed healed. God is so amazing.
 As well as leading the community outreach, I am also co-leading a group that is working to help a ministry in Iraq. We are organizing fundraisers here and helping organize a youth conference in Kurdistan (The safe and American friendly part of Iraq) this summer. I may even go. It's pretty awesome and I feel priviliged to be able to lead the group. Really good practice/training for what I will be doing in the future i.e. leading things.
Life is truly amazing, there is so much going on, too much for one entry. For the rest of the year I think I will be using this as my legit journal/diary, sharing both testimonies and things that are going on inside my life. Hopefully the stories will be enjoyed by all. God Bless ya'll