Back to Brooklyn

"There is a spiritual principle that anything which comes too easily or too quickly is usually insignificant. If you want to be a part of something truly significant, you will have to pay the price." --Rick Joyner A Prophetic History Part 1

Scott and I used to always pray that God would take us through such intense times such as the one we are in right now. I can recall many nights at college where I would stay up late in the night in prayer and worship, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone with God. Hours would pass and I feel like all I would say was more,more,more Lord. I would cry, and pray, and beg the Lord to let me know Him more, to let me experience Him in ways that would radically change my life. See I knew from experience, and from reading stories in the scripture, that to KNOW something usually literally translates into, to experience something. I knew full well that to love God, and know God, and pursue God the way that I desired would take more than reading the bible and going to church every Sunday and having some Christian friends. It had to be deeper, and it had to shake me and rearrange me and my thoughts and my perspective or else real physical life time change would not occur.

I really wanted to need God. Scott and I always said when we were married, that we wanted to live in a way that we were completely dependent on God. Not just that we would sometimes have to utter a prayer to get us out of  jam, but that we could literally walk through our whole life pointing to anything and everything and saying that's from God, this is from God, God did that, and this...EVERYTHING. We didn't want to be able to say anything came from the work of our own hands. Its a nice idea. Makes you feel courageous and really bold when you pray it. But when it actually begins to happen, you feel completely helpless. We are at a point in our lives where we can't do anything to better our situation. We don't have the resources to make things better, we don't have the status in the world to just quickly climb up to some sort of good standing. All we have is Him. And we can feel it. And its good, but it costs a lot.

We got a word from a friend a few months ago in prayer. She said she really felt like the longer we stayed in NY the more chance for us to get hurt.

What I might have failed to tell you is that Scott and I have felt God calling us out of Brooklyn for almost 2 years now. I think we were just too afraid to step out into anything. We wanted to have all our ducks in a row. Things just kept coming up, at first it was that we were newly married and had no money, then we were pregnant, then we had a good church, then we had a new born, then our whole family lived close by, we had security in our apartment. Things just kept coming up. And guess what, they always will. For the rest of your life, something will happen, something will come up, its un-ending. Life never stops moving. Even if you sit completely still and hold your breath and close your eyes, it still keep moving.

So we were back in Brooklyn with two pieces of information. One was that we could stay at the conference center at morning star for a small monthly fee. And the other was that we could stay with a family from MorningStar whom we had met on our trip to Charlotte. They often rent out rooms in their home for students at the MSU (morning star university) and offered a room in their home to us for an even smaller fee than at the conference center. Although the money side of it was enticing, we wanted to make sure we went where God wanted us to go. So we waited and prayed and eventually really felt like staying with this family would be the best option for our family according to Holy Spirit:)

We are quite private people. I know you might find that hard to believe, but we have established a lot of boundaries when it comes to our family time and our home time. Not that we keep people out or never invite anyone in, but we are very intentional about having days when its just us in our home with no distractions and no plans. So we really feel like God will grow us a lot by living with another family and we are a little scared but since we are facing so many challenges right now, we are at a point where welcoming one more really doesn't matter! Plus we feel that there will be more of a blessing in store by spending time with this family than we can see right now!

Once we felt like we finally knew where we would go, which was last week sometime, we sat down to pray and discuss what date we would leave.

Keeping that word from our friend in mind, we really felt like we needed to make the date sooner rather than later. We also felt it needed to be sooner because, something would come up that would prevent us from leaving soon and we felt like we needed to just put our foot down and claim a date. So we literally sat in our living room and said "OK God we need a date to move" the date I kept having in my mind for the past couple of weeks was February 23rd, but when I said that out loud (by the way this decision was made on the 12th) Scott quickly said, "sooner!". But eventually we both agreed that February 23rd felt good. It gave some time to be with people and pack up, but not too much time to allow things to keep coming up and pushing our date further away. The date wasn't the best date to our family, but we felt like it was God so we are sticking to it.

We have been facing so much opposition about this move. In ways that are seen and ways that are unseen. There as been a lot of anger between our families since we picked that date, Selah has been sick, then Scott and I got sick. We have no car, and renting a vehicle one way to get our stuff down there looks pretty much impossible right now and really expensive. Things keep coming up.

Which is why I wrote that quote at the beginning. We are confident that we have to fight for this word. We are stressed out, overwhelmed, literally sick and tired, but we have intense peace that it is all for God. So we won't give up. We are encouraged by the many that call us, text us, and write us messages every day telling us they are excited for us and that they really believe this is God. We are being held up by His word and by your prayers for us. And it is working!

We don't know how we will pack our stuff, let alone how we want it to be packed. We are in such a weary state right now, and yet we feel so victorious. We just want to encourage you to keep going. In whatever you are fighting for right now. Even if you literally have no strength to fight. Please just put your confidence and trust in God. We promise He always wins!