It's time for a review of the things I believe God impressed on me over the five years regarding what He was getting ready to do. This inventory, of sorts, has consistently been a critical step in my journey because it is so easy to get overwhelmed with the details--the details that matter and the details that don't matter.
Over time, I have experiences like I mentioned in the last posts where I have a strong sense about something. Sometimes I pray and ask for discernment and then something will hit me in a strange way and I just know deep down that it is related to my prayer. Other times something just hits me in a strange way and I begin to pray after the fact that God would help me discern whether that strange sense is something I need to remember. I'm sure it can happen in a myriad of ways, but in any case, it's easy to forget those experiences and my resolve to pay attention to them. Periodically, I need a moment of quiet to remember and take an inventory of those things, asking God to show me the thread that joins them all together.
Here are the moments that seem the most significant...
A kink in the hose:
At the very beginning of 2015, or even before, Mrs O and I had seen evidence of great hurt at THV. It felt as though something had stuck--a clog, a kink in a garden hose, or a rusty spigot that just wouldn't open and let the water run. I was looking for the source of the kink in the hose. I felt like God was asking me to search for the source of the problem so the proverbial hose could be disconnected from the broken spigot and connected up to one that is functional.
This is my favorite kind of work! I love being a catalyst for change. I love seeing the look on people's faces when they release themselves from captivity having recognized what is holding them back. The difficult thing is realizing it is not up to me. It is a great disappointment to see someone faced with the opportunity to be free who does not want to take it, but hope springs eternal that one day the joy of freedom will be so alluring the work of getting there will seem a small price.
Plowing the ground:
I remember some teaching I did at the beginning of the five years where I felt strongly that we needed to do some preparation as a group. I felt like we needed to identify things that were getting in the way of our progress, as individuals and as a group. The picture I had in my mind was a picture of a large field being harrowed or plowed up. Each time rocks were removed until finally the ground was soft, without rocks, and ready for planting.
The pruning:
There was also a time when I felt like God was showing me that the numbers at THV would get depressingly low. I was not to count people because I would become discouraged as God did some pruning. Pruning need not be considered a negative thing, either for THV or those being pruned away. It may be in some cases, and it may not be in others. Pruning is not simply to get rid of something bad. The purpose is to bear fruit. The Gardener can prune a scion out of one tree and graft it into another as He sees fit.
The purpose is to bear fruit, more fruit, better fruit.
The pruning analogy hit me while watching a couple of videos in an attempt to learn how to graft fruit trees. The first one kind of sets things up, but it's the second video which was so powerful to me. Two things seemed important to me in the second video: the pruning is a hard pruning where even full, lush, green growth is pruned away to let more sunlight in, and the nurse branch is there to feed the tree during the grafting process until the grafts are ready to carry on. The part about the nurse branch was particularly striking to me. It was very sudden. Final. Like when you're watching a dramatic movie and all of the sudden something is revealed.
The sound track stops.
Everything moves in slow motion for a moment while you absorb what you've just learned.
It was like that. I just didn't really understand what I'd just learned, yet.
If you want to watch the videos, they are short and the links are below. If the links fail to work, do a search for "Dave Wilson Nursery grafting" and I hope you'll find these two videos:
Tree Grafting 6 Month Follow-Up
Finish with planting:
I attended a Bible study at another church one day. A lady who attended our church was enjoying attending this study and she wondered if it would be interesting to me for our church, so I went with her one day. After the prayer time at the end of the study, a young woman came up to me and told me that during the prayer time she felt like God gave her three words for me: heal, restore, plant.
Why is 'plant' at the end? The order of the words seemed significant in that moment. But, planting seems like the beginning of something, not the end. It didn't occur to me until much later that these words were so compatible with the picture of the field being plowed. This was a season of preparation. We were preparing to plant.
Two trains:
I had a dream one day that I was on two trains at once--not inside the trains, but riding on top of two trains with my right foot on an old rusty steam engine and my left foot on a sleek white fast-looking train with shiny bluish green windows. They were going the same speed and I felt no urgency until I saw up ahead there was a tunnel. In my dream, I knew in my mind that I could not go through the tunnel on both trains. I had to move. I picked up my right foot and put both feet on the new sleek white train, and when I looked down the old rusty steam train had disintegrated into a cloud of rusty dust. It was completely gone.
A new thing:
I got several words that God was doing a "new" thing, that it was ideal that I was not trained formally as a pastor as I may be resistant to the "new" thing if I had been formally trained. These words came from folk inside the church and outside as they prayed for me, often these people did not know each other or have any knowledge that another person had prayed and sensed similar things. There were many times I felt unable to carry on, and these words kept me alive during some very difficult parts of the five years.
I've mentioned it before, but since we're doing an inventory I need to mention that I felt strongly that this season was a 5-year season. More specifically, I knew I had a vision for my role at THV for the calendar years 2015-2019. After the grafting and pruning word I felt strongly that I was not to complain about how it was going until the five years were up. My job was to live as transparently as possible. I was to share what God was doing in me and not worry about 'success' but simply do what I felt led to do. God and I had an appointment to discuss how things had been going at the end of the five years, on December 31, 2019 at midnight.
I'm sure there are more, but this is just an abbreviated inventory. The last bit I'll share didn't really feel like "a word" at the time, but looking back it clearly was a rhema word. THV leaders were at a retreat mid-September 2019 and I shared some of the things in this inventory with the group. I specifically shared the part about the five years. I'm not sure I had shared that before. I remember telling them how I looked forward to my meeting with God at midnight on December 31 and how I was going to tell him everything I had been holding back, "Except," I remember saying, "I have a feeling, by the time we get there, I'll know more about the next season and it won't be as difficult a conversation as it now seems."
This is just one in a series of stories about the events of the last year. If you would like to start at the beginning, go back and read about The Five Years.
