I’ve been wondering what I should blog about coming out of this period of time. So much to talk about…where do I begin? Then all of a sudden it came to me…write about the oil of gladness. For that is what I believe God has given me as a reward for my struggles. Contained within this oil of gladness is an element of favor, an element of revelation and understanding, an opening of the “eyes of the heart” and a seeing into one’s purpose and destiny. I’ll be writing about this much more in the coming weeks. It should be good.

In the meantime, a couple of relevant passages in Scripture are Psalm 45:7 (quoted again in Hebrews 1:9) and Isaiah 61:3. Wonderful verses to meditate on!

In late 2004, I went on a physical diet as well as a spiritual diet. You can read more about the genesis of that in my testimony. I was chasing after God and trying to bring myself out of a long-standing spiritual apathy, but I hadn’t really gotten a tangible touch from Him yet at that time. Then in 2005 my mom started going to the Healing Rooms in Petaluma, CA because of serious health and emotional issues. She had gone a few times without me when one day I drove down to meet her there after her session. I arrived early, so I had to wait a while for them to finish.

Now listen, this was bizarre. I wasn’t there for an appointment. I didn’t even quite understand what they were doing. I had no expectations anything was going to happen to me in the slightest. All I did was show up, and the moment I walked into that slightly-stuffy, aging, medical-like building in downtown Petaluma — WHOOSH! It was like stepping onto another planet.

It’s hard for me to remember exactly what was going through my mind at the time, but to use language I’ve learned since then, I had entered into a spiritual atmosphere. God was there…even though of course He is everywhere…His manifest presence was in that place. I could feel it. It was a tangible reality. I sat down in the waiting room, feeling waves of peace and love and a sense of belonging, of coming home, washing over me. And then the coolest thing happened — someone else was in that waiting room, and we got to talking. I was 22 at the time, she was in her sixties. But we made an instant connection. We were kindred spirits, as Anne Shirley would say. We had an amazing conversation that seemed to last for hours. It was the first taste of holy fellowship in the body of Christ that I had experienced in a long time, and it felt good.

I didn’t just encounter the Holy Spirit that day, I experienced unity in the Spirit. There is nothing like it, nothing like it on earth. It’s incredible. Barbara and I are still good friends to this very day, and currently attend the same church: Grace Fellowship. Interesting aside — the second time I felt the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit, that glorious spiritual atmosphere, was when I stepped foot in Grace’s sanctuary for the first time in late 2005. But that’s a whole ‘nuther story.

I could tell you about when I first started speaking in tongues (right after I was water baptized in late 2006), or when I first started receiving heavenly dreams or visions, or when I first heard His voice calling out to me, but really my entire journey up to this very moment began when I first encountered Him in that stuffy little storefront in downtown Petaluma. I’ll remember that day as long as I live.

You may think things are just cruising along in your life, but it doesn’t do you any good to be making tracks and moving along at a rapid pace if you are pointed in the wrong direction. You’ll just end up in the wrong place faster. Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop, sit down, and wait until you find out just where the heck you’re supposed to be heading toward.

My mind’s a bit hazy as I try to remember all the details, but the 2002-2004 timeframe was very difficult for me. Oddly enough, due to my eccentric upbringing, the bulk of my teen years in the 90′s went by smoothly, and I had a heap of fun. I was learning all sorts of things through my home schooling, I ran my own freelance Web design business, I performed music and toured with our family Celtic band “Distant Oaks”, I had a good amount of free time to explore different ideas and hobbies…it was a good time.

But as I headed into my early 20′s, my comfortable little bubble began to burst. We spent an extremely difficult couple of years on several creative projects that were like those “projects from hell” you hear about in artists’ circles. At the end of it all, we didn’t feel like our musical career was hitting its stride but rather we were going nowhere fast. In addition, this was the time when my mom started feeling unwell (it would be a while yet before we found out just how sick she was), and it impacted the frequency of our performances and our marketing campaign.

Beyond this, however, was a deeper sense of loneliness that was fast creeping up on me. For a long time, I hadn’t spent any effort trying to cultivate any lasting friendships with anyone, certainly not someone of the opposite sex in my age group. For one, I thought I was having plenty of fun doing family stuff (and sure, it was fun), and secondly, we were so busy touring around California and hanging out with musical acquaintances that I didn’t think I needed to “go out” with personal buddies. But suddenly, a case of artistic burnout coupled with a winding down of our career momentum left me reeling without any earth beneath my feet. I wasn’t in tune with God. I wasn’t going to church. I didn’t have any close friends. I didn’t even know any girls. I was in my 20′s and I felt like a looser, like one of those pimply-faced geeks they make fun of in tech cartoons. I was fat (really, I was). And, to top it all off, I had been dabbling in some sinful behavior that I knew was wrong and that I had been hiding from everyone else for a long time. All at once, what had often seemed like some innocent fun became the mark of a lost soul.

It all came to a head in (I believe it was) 2004 when I developed a severe case of colitis. I was out of shape, overweight, and now my digestive system was shot. I started not feeling like I could go anywhere because I’d have to run to the bathroom at any moment. I started having bouts of intense pain and felt like my body was breaking down. How could this be happening to me? It was only yesterday when I was young, carefree, and jolly, and now I’m a wreck. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown or had gotten “chronic fatigue syndrome” or some horrible disease.

But then something amazing happened. My mom, brother, and I were shopping at Whole Foods one day when one of us noticed this book called The Maker’s Diet by Jordan Rubin. With a title like that and a cover showing a rendition of the famous “Adam and God” painting by Michelangelo, it immediately grabbed our attention. After reading through it a bit and seeing Jordan’s amazing testimony of God’s healing through a Biblically-based diet, I immediately knew I had to try this diet as a way of saving my health. My mom agreed to do it with me to see if it’d make her feel better as well (and it really did for quite a while), and the rest of my family joined in as well simply because we weren’t going to cook two separate meals every time we sat down to eat!

I was astonished. In only a couple of weeks, I had lost at least 15 pounds, my colitis was nearly gone, and I felt more energetic than I had felt in months — even years. During the course of that summer, I ended up loosing over 30 pounds, and I’ve generally kept my weight and fitness in decent standing ever since. Oh, and my digestive system is working perfectly fine now, thank you very much.

But that’s really not the best part. The best part is that, when I first went on The Maker’s Diet, I also realized that I would need to go on a “spiritual” diet as well if I would at all be able to get out of the miserable hole I had fallen into. So I began to repent. I began to seek God again. I began to ask Him, beg Him to show me the way, to give my life meaning and purpose and direction again. I started reading the Bible more as well as Christian books filled with sound wisdom and revelation. It was a time of rapid transformation for both body and soul. As the months went by and I headed into 2005, I literally found myself rising up out of the darkness and loneliness that had ensnared me, and I began to catch a glimpse of the weighty prophetic destiny that God had placed on my life. It would be some time before that hazy picture became more clear — even now I’m still learning more about what God would have me do — but at least I knew I was finally headed in the right direction. Instead of moving to the beat of my own drum, I was following in the footsteps of my Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

God is the ultimate travel agent. When I trusted Him with my life, He took me on a trip of excitement, adventure, and romance that is only just beginning and can only get better from here on out. If you haven’t yet taken that leap of faith and stepped out in a quest to seek new horizons, heroic deeds, and chivalrous acts of nobility, I pray that God will bless you with the courage and the daring to begin a new journey that will take you to the edge of eternity and beyond.

In the next part of this series, we will discuss ways of hearing from God in the Spirit in order to understand the next leg of our journey. ‘Till then, may God’s face shine upon you as He holds you in the palm of His hand!

Where was I? Oh yes, JesusCulture, which is the brainchild of…nope, I already did that part. OK, so we went up to Redding, CA to attend the conference, and in past years, we’ve come away with body, soul, and spirit all reeling from the intenseness of it all. This year was no different. That Bethel Church crowd up there really puts you to work. Don’t ever go check them out if you don’t intend to jump, scream, shout, laugh, cry, stand up, kneel down, and — most importantly — worship Jesus Christ with your entire being and then some.

Now due to a, ahem, misunderstanding with who was supposed to get which tickets when, I wasn’t able to get into the main convention center auditorium. Last time when that happened (yes, I seem to be prone to other people forgetting my tickets), I had to go sit in the overflow room elsewhere in the convention center and watch a video screen. Thankfully, Holy Spirit is bigger than distance, and He did some awesome things in that room, but I wasn’t too keen on missing out on the grand experience.

However, apparently I and about 1,500 other people were in the same predicament, so those zany dudes up in Redding (is it something in the water?!?!) decided to put on an overflow CONFERENCE at the church itself. Get this: JesusCulture started out at Bethel Church. Then it outgrew the church, so they moved it to the local convention center. Now, it’s outgrown the convention center, and they had to move part of it back into the church. How long do you think it’ll take before both the convention center AND the church (which is not small by any means) are BOTH too small to fit all the people who want to come? Not long.

Alright, now on to the highlights of the event. It turns out that our overflow conference had some perks that the other people didn’t get to enjoy. Yes, we had video screens with satellite feeds of the main sessions, but we also had a bunch of live presentations and some live worship music for our own group as well, so it was fine. But the cool thing is that we got to have a healing revival right in our midst that they never had at the center!

What happened is that one of the live presentations was about receiving words of knowledge for people with physical or emotional ailments and asking them if they need prayer for those conditions. After talking about it for a while, Scott Johnson (the presenter) decided it was time to give it a whirl. So he asked everyone in the audience to ask the Lord to give them a word. Then he asked people to come forward up to the podium if they had received a word. Scores of people came up, and he started going on down the line asking them what the word was. They would call it out (pain in the left knee, tumor in the abdomen, fibromyalgia, what have you), and then when people would raise their hands in response, the person with the word of knowledge would go out in the audience to pray. This process went on uninterrupted for quite some time, and those of us without words or ailments called out were asked to find someone who needed prayer and join in on that.

Sitting next to me was a young lady who told me she had hurt her ankle while playing soccer, so I prayed for her healing. After a few moments, I asked her how it was doing, and she said it was a little better — but little isn’t good enough, so I prayed some more. She said it was better still, but at that point I felt that it probably needed a bit of time for God to work on it. That, or she was just being polite….but I always try to point my faith towards God when in doubt. Back to this story in a moment…

A whole bunch of people in the audience got healed, and some testimonies were just amazing. Serious injuries were healed, chronic diseases, muscular or skeletal immobility, you name it. Remember, these were audience members getting words for audience members praying for audience members. There was no “big man in a fancy suit” up in the front making it all happen. It was a God thing, not a diamond-studded preacher thing.

The incredible thing that happened, which I’ll never forget, is later when I was sitting on a bench outside waiting for a ride, a girl of, oh, 12 perhaps, came out in an obvious state of emotional turmoil and phoned her mom. I don’t think she realized I was sitting only a few feet away. “Mom, mom, you’ll never believe what’s happened! I’ve been HEALED!!!” Apparently, one of her legs had been longer than the other, and it made it awkward to kneel down or perform certain maneuvers, and she said it had felt “funny”. But now, in this service, her legs had supernaturally evened out (I don’t if one grew longer or the other grew shorter), and by God’s power, they were no longer askew! She could barely talk on the phone out of shock and amazement and excitement, and one can hardly blame her. It’s pretty cool when you get to see how an ordinary person outside of any manufactured hoopla is truly touched by the Holy Spirit.

But wait, there’s more! Previous to this, I had been walking by on my way out of the church when I overheard a women getting prayer from some church ministry folks for a sinus condition. For some reason, I felt in my spirit I needed to wait. So I waited nearby, and when they were done praying, she asked for prayer for her ankle. Now when you’ve prayed for someone in a certain way and they’ve gotten better, it gives you the faith to pray for that condition again for someone else. So I told her I’d just prayed for someone with an ankle problem and I’d be honored to pray for her. So I did, and very quickly she reported a big improvement and started dancing around (she was a dancer). Praise the Lord! This was before I ended up bumping to the young lady I’d prayed for originally who told me her ankle was a LOT better. Just like I’ve said on my blog, faith works.

Speaking of which, when she and her friend came outside (after I’d overheard the even-legs-girl’s phone call), they offered to give me a ride back to the convention center…which just goes to show you that the old saying is true: one good turn deserves another.

So I had a fantastic time up at JesusCulture, and it gave me a spiritual reboot in order to be more effective in my work and daily life. It’s easy to lose sight of God’s magnificence when you get mired down in the doldrums of performing various mundane activities every day. May it never be so, Lord, may it never be so! I pray we will always be aware of how close you are and how much over-the-top love you have for every one of us!

So I spent all day Saturday afternoon praying fervently, reading the Word, spending time in worship, and all that good jazz. I kept declaring I was NOT getting sick and that I would be well for the Sunday service at Grace. Mind you this was all happening while I was in bed with a fever and aching all over my body, so it wasn’t at all clear I’d be in any shape to be there the next morning.

But sure enough, come morning, my fever had broken, I felt way better, and I trundled off to church with instruments in tow. Everything went swimmingly at the worship service. Praise God! And come afternoon, I was feeling pretty fine! Monday I telecommuted from home just to get a bit of rest, but yesterday I went down to the office in San Francisco and really thought I was doing OK.

But late in the evening, I started feeling crummy again, this time in regards to congestion (as well as fatigue). Today I’m again working from home and not feeling so hot. It’s not a huge deal, but I certainly don’t feel healthy.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is…I don’t know. Why would God miraculously stave of my illness for a time and then let me get it later? Mysterious. But nevertheless, I serve a good and awesome Father, and I refuse to blame Him for any of my misfortune. And nothing I can go through here, especially a little sinus difficulty, is even remotely comparable to what my Savior went through 2,000 years ago. Nothing matters when I contemplate the glorious riches we have in Christ our Lord!