Empty Pockets

Empty Pockets

Mystify, arouse, and confuse me

Shatter all my plans and illusions

That I might lose my way

Don’t let me see the path or the light

Until I am ready to be led

To the harbor of the poor and willing heart

When there seems to be no remedy for darkness

Don’t fear to sink into it

Let God reveal Himself in all things, thru faith

And trust is my gift back to you, God…

 –Kevin Prosch, from “Every Ray,” Palaquin

Wendy Alec

Wendy Alec

In, Visions From Heaven, Wendy Alec recounts her conversations with God following a devastating two-year illness, which led to her husband’s abandonment.

Wendy and her former husband, Rory, started GOD TV, Europe’s first Christian television network. They had just signed on to work with Mark Ordesky, executive producer of Lord of The Rings, to make an A-grade secular blockbuster film from her end-times book series called, Chronicles of Brothers.

A week after she started working on the screenplay, she was hit with gastroperisis, a virus that damages the vagus nerve and causes intense and unending nausea. The condition was so rare that medical treatment had only been experimental.

iStock_000039953360SmallFeeling nauseous from morning until night, she began losing weight at an alarming rate. She sought healing prayer, medical advice, specialists, naturopathic help, experimental treatment ideas and drugs, but nothing abated the distress of being chronically sick every day and not knowing if it would ever end.

Her children and husband were bewildered and angry.

They lived out of their suitcases.

Their pets were kenneled for an entire year.

They abandoned their home for an entire year.

Her ministry with GOD TV seemed all but over.

The movie production came to a screeching halt.

And eventually her husband left her for another woman.

Trapped in a debilitating illness, she had lost everything.

She wanted her life to be over.

God had been her all in all, but now she was reeling with abandonment. That was the hardest part.

GodYet God was there the whole time. As the grip of her disease began to loosen, she had vivid conversations with Him in the night. God talked to her about the great sifting of His people, beginning with Job and Peter. That faith is proved genuine and strengthened beyond measure in these times. Or not. That people who come through it are prepared for a weighty “mantle” of responsibility and authority for the end-time season that is upon us. He answered her questions with tenderness and compassion.

Still, the trauma of her experience remained like a deep scar. She feared she would never feel safe again. How could such a bad thing happen to her when she had set her love on God?Continue reading

Knowing

Knowing

JahazielA month ago, legendary Christian rapper Jahaziel walked away from his faith. He’d been a professing Christian for twenty years. Online magazine Rapzilla called him the most important U.K. artist in the history of Christian hip-hop. But Jahaziel couldn’t reconcile the mass killings in the Bible with the idea of a loving God.

He posted on Facebook saying, “You can believe the bible and its God all you want but to me he just demands my fear because he cannot earn my respect. I cannot possibly agree that he is love unless I ignore all the men, women and little children he has slaughtered throughout the entire bible…I have tasted and seen – and my conclusion is that Christianity (it’s flawed book, bloodthirsty god and mythical savior) I have found unsatisfactory and unworthy of my allegiance or worship unless by threatening to kill me if I don’t – as Christianity does.”

Kirsten PowersKirsten Powers, a Democratic commentator at Fox News, was an atheist for most of her life. Beautiful, bright, and successful, she had no desperate reason to need God. Christianity Today reported that Powers described herself as wavering “between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.” She said, “I would never adhere to any religion—especially to evangelical Christianity, which I held in particular contempt.”

Her boyfriend at the time, wanted to get hitched but said he couldn’t marry a non-Christian. He asked her if she could keep an open mind about faith. That did it! Wanting to be seen as open-minded, she started attending Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

Pastor Tim Keller

Pastor Tim Keller

After eight months of listening to Pastor Tim Keller’s astute sermons, she decided the evidence supporting Christianity was there. Still, she didn’t feel any connection to God and thought people who said they heard God’s voice or had experiences were either delusional or lying.

Jesus Walks on WaterRight about that time, Powers took an overseas trip. One morning while sleeping, she experienced a strange cross between a dream and reality. In that instant, Jesus appeared to her and said, “Here I am.”

The experience was more than a little traumatizing.Continue reading

The Eyes of Art

The Eyes of Art

Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa

Why do six million people flock to see the Mona Lisa each year? Why did the Louvre in Paris pay seven million dollars to create a controlled-climate room just for this work of art? The canvas is even protected with bulletproof glass. The painting has been stolen, but cannot be insured because it’s considered priceless. Though the artist, Leonardo Da Vinci, was renown, the prevalent belief is that his subject was a 24-year-old mother of two—no one famous or special. Why does this painting get so much attention?

The Mona Lisa (1503-1519) has remained enormously popular for several centuries, way before Dan Brown’s novel became a bestseller. Many say the woman’s enigmatic smile draws people in. What do you say? Does she look like she knows something? Or does her countenance reflect some kind of peace?

The Scream

The Scream

Another famous painting, The Scream (1893), by Edvard Munch throbs with the strong emotions of fear, terror, doubt, pain, and suffering. The painter wrote down his inspiration for the work saying…

“I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

Some editions of Arthur Janov’s book, The Primal Scream, used Munch’s painting on the cover. The ghost-like face has been recreated in movies and Halloween costumes. Clearly, the painting struck a chord.

Starry Night

Starry Night

Van Gogh’s, Starry Night (1889), is a profoundly beautiful and mysterious work of art. The artist painted the night sky from the view out his asylum window. He admitted himself to the hospital after his breakdown in 1888, when he mutilated his ear.

Van Gogh wanted to believe in an afterlife. He wanted it to be true and associated it with a larger universe portrayed by the night sky. He wrote, “”It would be so simple and would account so much for the terrible things in life, which now amaze and wound us so, if life had yet another hemisphere, invisible it is true, but where one lands when one dies.”

Don’t we yearn for the same thing—the glorious larger story that will one day wrap around our finite and sometimes tragic smaller stories?Continue reading