None of us knew what we were doing, we just knew we had found a place where God showed up. We learned that He loved being where people praise His name and where they are hungry. It was like going home for Thanksgiving every week. We had no preacher but we sang and shared everything we ever heard about our "new" God. We met in the stores or saw each other on the street and instantly we would begin to talk about our Jesus. We were sure we had found someone no one else had ever met. Most of us had been going to church for years, each to different churches, but no one had ever heard it could be like this. One day I was reading the scriptures and this passage jumped off the page at me "He gives me beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" (Isaiah 61:3) I realized that He had indeed turned my mourning into dancing. The depression and despair were miraculously gone and in their place were many new brothers. These brothers seemed to love me and accept me as my own brother. Thus began a love affair with the scriptures. God was really speaking to ME! I wish I could tell you that the road became suddenly smooth and that my husband quit drinking and my life at home became suddenly renewed but of course, we all know it doesn't work like that. God promises to take us through the valleys but if you're looking for instant holiness you are in for disappointment. God promises new life but we must seek it. We must find Him and then follow Him. He even tells us that the road is narrow and many do not take it. One of the first things I learned from this new Holy Spirit part of God was that Jesus still heals today. Isaiah tells us that He was wounded for our sins, bruised for our iniquities. The punishment for our peace was on Him and by His stripes we are healed. Wow! I had been told that He used to heal but that He doesn't do that any more. Why? Did sick people suddenly not need to get well? I asked and the answer came. God had originally intended man to live forever, That Eden was perfect and man would be able to live there and commune with God for eternity. But Satan stepped in and brought death with him. But (Oh Glory) Jesus came to put it back to the way it was in the first place. I tried to tell this to everyone who would listen. They looked at me like I had two heads. I KNEW I was right! I just knew that we didn't have to be sick. I also found out that it wasn't God who took my brother. I had to tell everyone! Unfortunately, they weren't ready to hear what God had to say. I began to question if I had really heard right myself. However, it wasn't long before I would be faced with a test of my new belief. The Birth of a Church It wasn't long before our little group began to grow. One of us knew of an old abandoned church in an old abandoned town near by that we could have if we wanted to clean it up. We had lots of enthusiasm and with a little elbow grease we were soon able to become a church. We still had no pastor but that would come later. We began meeting every Sunday. I had long since left the dead church I had attended for years after I heard a television minister declare that if I was going to a church that wasn't teaching about the Holy Spirit, it was a social organization, and if the truth was known it was full of sin. I felt at that moment God released me from that "club". My search began, to find somewhere where the Holy Spirit was being preached, however the only place I could find this was on television or the radio. One morning I was listening to a wonderful woman preach and learned to my surprise that she pastored a church about 36 miles from my home. I purposed in my heart that I would go there and learn about this kind of church. One morning I felt I heard God say in my spirit, "Go to church in Shenendoah" I had made a note of the address so I called my daughter-in-law and asked her if she would go with me. It was late when we arrived in town and much to my dismay, when I arrived at the address, there was a note on the door that read "We have moved to 908 Day street. I had absolutely no clue where that would be. My heart sank because it was time for most churches to be starting and I had no idea where we were to go. I began to drive from one end of the town to another while my daughter-in-law watched the street signs. Nothing. So we went to the other side of town and started driving in that direction. Still nothing. We finally wound up in an industrial section of the town and I began to lose hope. There certainly wouldn't be a church in this part of town. About that time "Bang!" my tire dropped suddenly into a big pothole in the street, and it felt as if I had broken an axle. I got out of the car to see if there was any damage, and right before my eyes was a street sign marked "Day Street". Before me was a sign that read " FCF Church" pointing towards a metal building. "That has to be it!" I cried and jumped out of the car with all the enthusiasm of a child entering an amusement park. Within those doors was everything I had been hoping for. People who worshiped God without a look of sour grapes on their face. People who felt like family came up to us and welcomed us like we had always been a part of them. It was God and I knew it. I could scarcely contain my excitement and began to tell them how God had found this place for us and that I would be going to camp meeting in Tulsa Oklahoma because I had asked God to help me get there. Low and behold, my husband would be working 50 miles from Tulsa at just the right time and I knew that too, was God. I was absolutely certain that God had smiled and that I had arrived! I knew that Oklahoma was the "bible belt" and that there would certainly be many churches to show us what we needed to do to be a "spirit-filled" church. I was so excited on the trip there that I could hardly sit still. As we neared the town where my husband would be working we passed by a beautiful church just about a mile from the camping ground where we would be parking our trailer. Hadn't God laid out this whole journey? This must be the perfect place for us to fellowship. It turned out not to be the place where we would be camping and we had to go into town and park across the street from Wal Mart. There must be some mistake! This is not what I had envisioned, but of course nothing would stop me from going outside town to that beautiful church. The following morning as I went downtown to make deposits and pay rent I passed by what appeared to be an old abandoned church building. The sign outside read "Church on the Rock". I reasoned, "That probably isn't even a church anymore, just a dingy old brick building." but the sign read, Services Sunday am and pm and 7:30pm Thursday evenings. It was Thursday. On the way back to the trailer, I glanced again, at the dingy old building and I felt the Spirit of God say, "This is where I want you to go." "What?" Hadn't I prayed for the perfect church? This sure didn't look like a perfect church to me. There probably were not even services in there. I had envisioned hallowed halls and brightly lit corridors, a huge sanctuary with a band for lively praise music, certainly not this broken-down old building. But as I drove on toward the trailer, excitement began to rise inside. "Oh well, I could come by this evening and see if they really had service I suppose." Then of course go to the original God-choice church on Sunday. That evening I felt strangely excited. I arrived at the church at 7:15 and there were no cars, no life at all. A little disappointed, I thought, "Well, it is a little early."so I drove around to find a place to buy a soda. At 7:30, when I arrived back at the church there were a few cars there so I shyly approached the front door. As I walked into the shabby little sanctuary, a handsome young man with a booming voice and big brown eyes greeted me. It was if he were greeting a long lost sister. I immediately knew I had found my home away from home. A beautiful woman with black hair and beautiful dark eyes was seated at the piano. When she began to play, I was certain I would look up an see angels singing and dancing. She would play awhile and then speak to us for awhile. I had never seen anything like it. Finally the young man got up to preach and I learned right there the difference between speaking and anointing. "This is it," I thought, " I have arrived!" A whole summer of learning what real church was like and then taking it home to my wonderful little group back home. To top off the whole experience I would be going to Kenneth Hagin's Camp meeting in Tulsa! Wow! Looking around at this tiny little group, I choked back a tear and realized, they looked just like our little group back home and so did this dingy little building. But the Spirit of God was there and that made it the most beautiful place on earth! Looking back on all those years from the vantage point I have now, I am amazed at the way God has orchestrated the lives of that little group. How in those very early stages, we as a group had developed such a hunger for God, but at the same time such a hatred for the organized, dead religion we had been infected by. Of course, when we began in that tiny little dumpy place, we had visions of one day being a mega church, one that would have people flocking through the door, just like all the big mega churches we had seen on television or envisioned in our imaginations. Having no idea what church should be, we naturally wanted to prove that whatever we had was better than what we had before, even though we were’nt certain what the differences were. Other than the fact that we had all received the infilling of the Holy Spirit, with the evidence of speaking in tongues, we didn’t really know what to expect. No one in our neck of the woods had ever even experienced that. We were different, but we didn’t care. We were happy, oh so very happy. Eventually we did get a preacher, a very charismatic one at that, when he spoke we were sure we were privileged to our own personal audience with God. We learned to recognize the presence of God, and we began to praise Him in ways we had never before heard or seen. We were innocent, naive, and childlike. We loved our Daddy, and He took good care of us. Unfortunately, as we began to grow, we didn’ t seem to notice when the persecution started. We knew no one would understand us, but they would some day come to know the truth and join us in our glorious adventure. Then everyone would love us, and be so grateful they had found us. Right? Knowing that God must be in a hurry to get us going, we moved from that meager little place into a grand, expensive, beautiful building we could not afford. But we were pretty sure God would keep up the payments. We began to grow and increase in number. Hadn’t we arrived? It wasn’t long before some of our original group began to be persecuted. The lies began to whirl about. We weren’t really all that surprised, but we knew the truth so it didn’t seem to bother us. Eventually the charismatic pastor we all loved so much just packed up and left leaving us with a large building payment and untold other miseries. In the wake of his retreat, some very bruised and disappointed people were left clinging to each other, and wondering what had happened. What to do but find another pastor. So we began the search. A few people came to try out but none really seemed to be the one. Eventually we settled on one from hundreds of miles away who felt he was to lead us until we found the one. Life began to improve, we enjoyed our new interim pastor, even though we must have known how difficult it was for him to drive his family back and forth all that way. We finally felt God was leading us to move away from that big beautiful setting and we found a run down old metal building that had been a bar, but was much more affordable, and moved in. The building was in terrible shape, it hadn’t been built well, the heating was atrocious, the insulation was almost non existent but we were determined to fix it up. We had learned that life isn’t as easy as we once thought it would be, but we settled down to become who God wanted us to be. Some of us anyway. One by one, the less committed pew warmers began to fall away. We weren’t surprised, doesn’t this happen in all churches? We kept going under horrendous circumstances. Terrible cold, with little or no heat, hot scorching summers with no air conditioning, and mold growing in the moisture ridden walls and floors. We didn’t blame those who left, that were in it for the mega church setting. We decided that it was time to change our name to a more appropriate name for who we had become. The traveling pastor told all of us to pray and see if God would give us a name. Everyone dutifully submitted what they thought a good name would be, but none seemed to be the right name. One morning the pastor stood up and announced our new name was to be "Revelation Light of Jesus Christ" God had chosen our new name. "I remember thinking, now that’s a mouthful". I had never heard a church with such a long name, and didn’t really even understand what it really meant. It began to be obvious God was not going to choose a pastor for us out of those we were trying out. The traveling pastor was not to be the full time pastor, and finally it became evident that God was about to choose a pastor from our midst. During the times in which the traveling pastor was gone we seemed to be navigating towards a young man who would have been the least expected person in the group. He was quiet, unassuming, and had been very hesitant to even join us. He was the husband of one of our original group, but had managed to keep in the background. Little by little it became obvious that this man would become our leader. He would never have agreed to this if he hadn’t felt that God was calling him to the office. He was not and never has been one to crave the spotlight. He had been deathly afraid of any kind of public speaking, yet we knew his heart was hungry for God, and he would take this office very seriously. After much waiting and praying, he finally agreed to step into the pastors position. His wife actually having the pastoral gift. He leads with great discernment as a prophet for these times. We soon learned that God isn’t necessarily impressed with grand church buildings with thousands of members. What He is more impressed with is a people whose heart is hungry, and who are eager to change rather than join the multitudes. And as for us, the presence of God became the drawing factor rather than plush furnishings and grand buildings. Stumbling through, with no pattern to follow, we began to understand pioneering. Pioneers leave the place they have been comfortable, and search for places they have never seen. |
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| My Biography Page Two |
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