Monday, September 29, 2008

Welcome to the Potter's House!

This is pretty much the title for this whole DTS. All the subjects so far have had something to do with yielding to the Potter and letting Him slowly start to mold and build us into who He wants us to be. I know this update is late in coming, but I have been in such a whirlwind these past couple days that it's hard to find time to even check e-mails and such let alone write them. The main thing that I want to tell you all about concerns this last week, however in the interest of quick prequels I figured I should give you a glimpse into the weeks before.

We've been studying a lot of foundational things first off, such as knowing God's voice, learning true worship and intersession. Last week we had intensive classes on inductive Bible study. Every Friday we go out on the streets in the evening and worship, pray, and minister to people. These things all prepared me for this past week which I just had to write about!

This past Sunday, our group was preparing to leave for Washington DC, which is where the Justice House of Prayer is located. There is a YWAM team there that is solely focused on intercession, specifically for our nation and to end abortion. Anyway, we were planning on heading down Sunday evening and staying there for a week. However, we found out God had other things in mind. Jason Hershey, the head hancho of the DC team called and told us that he felt a very strong need to go to NYC and pray. So strong of a need in fact that he was there right now trying to find housing for his team and ours if we were interested in joining them. To me this seemed a little more than a leap of faith, it felt more like a dive of craziness, but God definitely had everything under control. We didn't end up being able to come until Monday night when Jason found an evangelism center in Brooklyn that was willing to house us for a night. So we all slept on the floor decently well, which was good because in the morning the owners informed us that they've had several incidents with mice! The next day we were told that a church in the Bronx had two community houses they would love for us to use. The apartment the girls stayed in was really nice and completely mouse-free (*praise Jesus).

The next four days are hard to sum up, they were so impactful and amazing, but I will try. On Tuesday we headed for Wall Street and prayed for the nation in front of the huge bronze bull which is near the stock exchange building. Then we sang worship songs right there, in the middle of a huge crowd of people. The center of the prayers were that Americans would stop putting their faith in money and turn back to God. We also spent some time reading through all of the Proverbs and praying them over the nation.
Wednesday was the day of the last presidential debate, which took place at HOFSTRA University which wasn't too far from where we were. We spent most of the day walking around the campus praying for the debates. A really cool thing that happened there was a professor from HOFSTRA was actually prayer walking at the same time, she met up with my small group and prayed with us. A specific thing we prayed for was that the issue of abortion would be brought up during the debate and that it would be clear which side the candidates stood for, which if you watched this happened. We want abortion to become even more focal than the economy, it's time for the innocent bloodshed to end! Again we worshiped and then spent the evening at church member's house to watch the debate.
Thursday we went to Times Square and broke off into small groups to pray for the media. We each covered a different broadcasting station, either ABC, MTV, NBC, or CBS. My group went to NBC. We all kept getting the same phrases and ideas to pray which has never happened to me before, it made me really excited. We prayed for the abortion issue to be talked about on the news and in famous talk shows, for major executives to take a stand for truth, and that moral values would again make their way into mainstream television. Later, we met up with the others and heard that many of their prayers were the same. A specific thing for the CBS group was that christian shows and news stories would be the new springboard for bringing CBS back to being a top station...more about that later. Then we stood in the center of Times Square and worshiped again. It's crazy how the presence of God can just manifest anywhere. I definitely felt it then. People milled all around us, but no one seemed to even notice.
Friday we visited the national headquarters of Planned Parenthood (there's one in DC too). We walked around the block and just prayed for the conviction of those that worked there and for the conversion of the building to be something completely opposite what it now stands for. Afterwords, we packed up everything and started for home, but first made an important stop at the Hudson River. Jason explained to us that many years ago, certain religious groups had placed curses on all the river bodies in America as a symbol of bringing death and destruction to all the cities in America. He said that recently he had felt called to send members of his team to pray over different rivers and "purify" them as Elisha did in the Bible. Not only did we pray for and "anoint" the river, we had communion on it's banks. It's hard to explain when something just "feels right" about what you're doing, even though it sounds weird all that we did just felt right.
Finally, on the way home we got a call from the DC team. They were super excited to tell us that CBS was talking about covering one of the Prayer House's friday night "rubble" sessions (which is basically an intensive night of prayer). None of us had expected to get an answer to our prayers that quickly! It was really cool. Not only that, but early we found out that FOX is interested in interviewing Lou Engle about the parable within the movie "Horton Hears A Who", which has the famous line, "A person is a person, no matter how small..." Needless to say, it was a very fitting end to an awesome week!

I loved all that I learned for these amazing people of intersession. They were all young and dedicated to spending a year or two of their lives to just pray for the country. It was so inspiring! Anyway, this is the majorly simplified version of the past three weeks, but I hope that you'll catch on to my excitement and join us in continued prayer that the nation would wake up to the awfulness of abortion and that discernment would be given to all the voters who will be heading to the polls in a few weeks.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to expand on all this at some time, but for now...I miss all of you and wish you many blessings!