World Mandate

Every year, Antioch Community Church puts on this annual missions conference called World Mandate. You get great speakers, fun worship, incredible testimonies, I mean, God just moves. So what was it about this years conference that I had to blog about it? Well, Norman had this thing called snow. And not just any snow, record breaking snow!

OK, I do have to admit that people from Oklahoma really like to freak out about weather. Like they truly enjoy sitting around, watching the weather channel, and freaking out about it. Naturally, the weekend we left for this conference a state of emergency was declared.

Just watch as my wonderful car mates and I were driving southbound I-35. The windshield wipers froze, but there wasn't any place to turn off and shake them off, which meant that someone had to climb through the sun roof and change them.

HOLD UP!!

So, I'm trying to upload this enlightening video, and this lovely window comes up:

I click on the "Upload Terms and Conditions" and this comes up:


And I've tried this on 3 separate occasions, spanning quite a few months with the same response. What does this tell me? I may not be uploading that video after all. Does anyone else find this SUPER BIZARRE and SHADY?!

Stitches

Proverbs 12:18 Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Can I just pause and emphasize the power of words? Here goes:

I was at work, doing the usual, mixing up some waffle cone batter with a machine grade blender that looks like this. It's at least a foot long. So, as I'm mixing the batter in a container a little less than half the size of the blender (Yes. I know. Bad idea), I turn it on low, turn around behind me, and scoop some more powder into the mix. I did this a couple of times til I heard my co-worker gasp, "Oh my gosh!"

Naturally I spin around thinking, "Oh crap, the batter! Watch out for the blades!"

Too late. It got me.

Aside from the pain in my finger, I noticed red stuff on the floor and all over my hand. Praise the name of Jesus that I was working with someone who is competent on handling this red stuff, because I am not!

Aside from almost passing out due to blood loss, praying the Holy Spirit to stop the bleeding, my sister came to the rescue, and a whopping 12 stitches later: my finger's fine!


Back to the power of words: I was wondering why this happened. I went through these declarations by Steve Backlund in the morning, one of which says:

Any adversity, attack, accidents and tragedies that were headed my way are diverted right now in Jesus' name (Psalm 91).

I was like, "What's the deal? I mean, I declared that, and believed that, so...." About that time, I got a text from another co-worker that I worked with the day before. It said something like, "Weird how yesterday we were joking around about cutting our fingers."

Wow. I forgot about that. We totally opened a curse on ourselves. What I then realized is as followed:
1. The co-worker that saved my life switched shifts with someone else that day. That other co-worker cannot handle red stuff.
2. The bleeding stopped.
3. My sister answered her phone on the first call. That never EVER happens.
4. My finger's still attached. No tendons, bone, or anything got damaged. Aside from it being deep, it was fine.

ihop

Over the past couple of month, random people started giving me words saying they say me ministering to people in Africa. My reaction: "God, I have no problem going to Africa, but I need to hear from You." Well, I did.

I was at this place called ihop. No, not the international house of pancakes, the international house of prayer! The end of every December, they have this conference called onething. My sister and I went last year and got totally ripped over the book of Revelation. Naturally, we followed it up with another trip to it this year with a handful of our friends (that made it a lot more fun, as noted by the traveling puppet show below).

One night Loren Cunningham, the director of ywam was speaking about Nigeria. Somewhere in the midst of him talking, I made the connection that he was talking about Africa. I think my response was something like, "Huh, Africa again. Bizarre." God then screamed at me in the spirit, "GO!" I mean, aside from the audible voice of God, you can't get much more clear than that.

So, next stop: Africa.