My calling as a prophet (part II)

Here are some more journal entries regarding things God showed me regarding my calling as a prophet, from just before leaving for DTS outreach to shortly after DTS just before flying home to visit for the holidays and raise support.

9/9/08

[At the end of my last DTS class before outreach, the guest lecturer began to turn to everyone in the class and share prophetic words with them. I had never seen anything like it, but below is my notes of what he told to me minus some of the more personal things he said, though for me the personal things established his credibility as a prophet.]

Ezekiel 47 – 4 levels of water, God wants to take me deeper, to a new level of ministry beyond what I see and know

God wants to take all timidity out of my life.

God is pleased that I truly fear Him.

6/10/08

Books / author that helped create my social consciousness:
The Next Christendom – Phil Jenkins
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Communist Manifesto
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Everything Must Change
Cry, the Beloved Country
Tony Campolo books
Cornel West
Cenizas de Izalco
No Me Agarran Viva
House of the Spirits
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
To Kill a Mockingbird
Ron Sider

11/10/08

Deus,

Ezekiel 47 – what was prophesied over me by Pastor Lincoln. Water comes from the temple, starts as a trickle. From south side. Flows east. Man leads me toward the east and measures water every 1000 cubits. Ankles. Knees. Loins. River that cannot be forded. Brings me back to the bank. Trees growing on both sides. Go east to Arabah? Then to sea. Waters of sea become fresh/healed. Every creature that swims wherever the two rivers go will live. Makes other waters fresh/healed. Everything lives where the river goes. Fishermen will stand beside it, place for spreading nets, fish of many kinds. Swamps and marshes will not be healed, will be given for salt.

(Water has to be moving to be fresh/healed. Water in swamps and marshes is stagnant.)

Trees for food grow next to river on both sides. Leaves will not wither and fruit will not fail. Bear every month because waters flow from sanctuary, fruit for food and leaves for healing.

I am not the water, but one who has the privilege to witness it, to be taken to where it is deep and to witness the healing it brings, turning salt to fresh, and the bearing of fruit and bringing of life to creatures.

I am also a vessel of the living water, because the Holy Spirit dwells in me, the water flows through me.

14/10/08

I Samuel 3

God calls us by name. The proper response is, “Speak, LORD, your servant is listening.”

LORD, I want to say the same to You. I am Your servant and I am ready to hear whatever You have to say to me. I want to hear and obey You because I am here to do Your will not mine.

Open my vision, LORD. I want my hopes and dreams to be overwhelmed by Your hopes and dreams – I want to be driven by Your vision, not my own.

God, sometimes I just feel so overwhelmed by the disconnect between nice, inspiring theory and the actual size of the task at hand – which seems, well, impossible. Inequality is so widespread with roots running so deep, so complex, God it seems unchangeable. But I know Your heart aches for the oppressed, LORD, that You are a God of justice and You are not pleased with the present situation. What is it that You want me to do, little-ole’-me? Speak, LORD, Your servant is listening.
For now stay at the Lighthouse to get a better understanding of inequality and to be solidary with the oppressed, to learn more about their situation and what can be done by hearing their voices, and really experiencing their kind of life.

18/10/08

LORD,
Thank you for last night, for using me to bring Your message to this church, and for once again confirming the calling – the greater calling – You have been showing me that You have for me. To be a prophet, to take Your word to Your church, to wake people up, to speak Your message to them and share Your heart with them. LORD, I know that I am not a great preacher in terms of being a charismatic speaker who riles up the congregation to rip and roar with amens, alelujas, glorias a Deus…. I certainly do not speak the most eloquent Portuguese … but the power does not come from my ability to speak, but because the message is from Your heart and carries its own weight. I am just Your mouthpiece, the vessel of Your Holy Spirit. It is You who works in the hearts of people, I am just the messenger. I don’t have to trust in my own ability, I only need to trust in You, that You will equip me to do whatever You call me to. I don’t want to be like Moses and question my ability to speak for You and make You provide another to speak for me, because things can be lost in translation. But I want to continue to depend on You and obey You, and share the messages that come from Your heart for Your people, for the renewal, edification, and building up of Your church, whether that is here in Brazil, in the US, or wherever You may take me.

Love you,
Stef

20/11/08

LORD,
I thank You for how You used Sidney tonight and his message of restored so you can restore to confirm what You spoke to me about my calling during outreach – as a prophet to wake up the church and mobilize it into action. I also thank You that You showed me that the plans You have for me in terms of that calling are so much bigger than those regarding []. But You will take care of me in the little things, too. Thank You, Father.

Love you,
Stef

21/11/08

Jeremiah 15:16-20
16Your words were found and I (AN)ate them,
And Your (AO)words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart;
For I have been (AP)called by Your name,
O LORD God of hosts.
17I (AQ)did not sit in the circle of merrymakers,
Nor did I exult
Because of Your hand upon me I sat (AR)alone,
For You (AS)filled me with indignation.
18Why has my pain been perpetual
And my (AT)wound incurable, refusing to be healed?
Will You indeed be to me (AU)like a deceptive stream
With water that is unreliable?
19Therefore, thus says the LORD,
"(AV)If you return, then I will restore you--
(AW)Before Me you will stand;
And (AX)if you extract the precious from the worthless,
You will become My spokesman.
They for their part may turn to you,
But as for you, you must not turn to them.
20"Then I will (AY)make you to this people
A fortified wall of bronze;
And though they fight against you,
They will not prevail over you;
For (AZ)I am with you to save you
And deliver you," declares the LORD.
21"So I will (BA)deliver you from the hand of the wicked,
And I will (BB)redeem you from the grasp of the violent."

LORD, regardless of how people respond to me, You are with me and that is what matters. Thank You for restoring me and calling me to be your portavoz, so that others may be restored through me.

Love you, LORD,
Stef

My calling as a prophet (part I)

Below are some journal entries from my first journal since arriving in Brazil (I am finishing up #5 now) pertaining to things God started to speak to me regarding my calling as a prophet. Perhaps I will post some entries from my later journals later.

19/5/08

I am a prophet

What I have learned about my calling so far since being here:
- God wants me to raise consciousness among His people who are ignorant of the role they play in contributing to oppression (rather than being repulsed/annoyed by them)
- God wants me to use my writing to raise consciousness in the body of Christ, to communicate regarding social issues and suggest roles Christians may play

31/5/08

My mission here is to seek Your Kingdom, to be solidary with the oppressed, to promote conscientização. Help me make the right steps toward fulfilling that, and finding Your specific calling for me.

31/5/08

Ezekiel 3:16-21
If I do not warn people with God’s message, to make them conscious of their wrongdoing, they will continue in sin, but if they had heard, the righteous would have responded and been cleansed from their sin. The weight is on me if I do not communicate the message. It is not for me to worry about how they respond, because the righteous will take heed. I am just the messenger, and my job is to speak the message God gives me, to point out wrongdoing and injustice so people are aware.

9/6/08

What I have learned so far regarding my gifts and calling:
- Writing – gift
o Can be used to raise consciousness, to fundraise, to spread ideas, be a voice for those who don’t have it – autora comprometida
- Calling – prophet
o Voice of those who are oppressed (portavoz)
o Raise consciousness among those who are ignorant of issues pertaining to poverty
- Listener, collector of stories, mobilizer
- Not one actually doing the work, but observing it, analyzing it, and communicating to others why it needs to be done.
- Looking for answers to questions regarding the roots of poverty – the best place to be is with the poor so I can learn their stories and begin to gain an understanding of their situation before seeking a way to improve it.
- I am not their savior, but I can fight at their side, and I must be at their side to fight at it

God, I thank you that You are putting faces on poverty and oppression, that my lofty ideals are being grounded into reality, that I am beginning to learn the practical side of things so that theory may be put into action.

Problem: training = theory with little action
practice = action with little theory
Practice needs more time for theory and training needs more time for action?

17/6/08

The oppressed have been deprived of their voices. Perhaps I can help their voices be heard as a portavoz because I can listen to their stories and share them with whatever audience I can gather through my writing.
- Through telling individual stories, I can help raise consciousness, help people see oppressed as individuals.
- Goal of email update is to help people see oppressed as individuals.

23/6/08

God,
The more I seek Your will for me, the more You speak to me and reveal to me, the more responsibility I have to obey. There is no use in hearing You if I don’t obey. I want to be a doer of Your will and not just a hearer. So as You speak to me while I am here, as I know You will, I ask that You would also be working in me and strengthening me and preparing me so that I am ready to obey when You ask me.

Lessons from the Amarelinho

The amarelinho is the little yellow bus that runs through the slum. Although the bus line has a number (103), everyone simply refers to it as the amarelinho, or "little yellow". Riding on the amarelinho is an adventure in itself, like a R$0.55 rollercoaster ride that actually gets you where you're going. Though, depending on the time of day and how off-schedule the buses are running, you will likely be standing for this ride, but don't worry, if that is the case, you will likely be packed in enough that you won't fly around much!

There are now a couple of newer amarelinho buses with a slightly new design. God has been speaking to me a lot through analogies lately, using simple, tangible examples to represent a bigger lesson. This happened the first time I got on one of these new amarelinho buses. They may look more chic, but someone seriously errored in the new design. Perhaps they thought that using slightly larger seats would make the bus ride more comfortable, but they obviously didn't consider that by making the aisle smaller, it is nearly impossible to squeeze past others standing, and given that the bus only has one door in the front to both enter and exit, that is a challenge. The seats are also staggered so there is not a straight aisle, making it challenging to get through. As I boarded this bus during the morning rush of people heading to work, I couldn't help but thinking that whoever thought of this new design had obviously never riden on the amarelinho before! A five year old kid from the slum could have come up with a more practical design!

The bigger lesson: this is what happens when people from the outside try to fix problems they know nothing about. Well-intentioned people often try to do things to help those more in need, but they can't do it apart from the input of those very people, because they are the ones who best know their own situation and they can come up with the best answers to how to address it.

I was reminded of this lesson this morning as I was reading through my old journal entries since arriving in Brazil for the first time. (I'm currently on my 5th journal since arriving - I jot down struggles, questions, lessons learned, things God speaks to me, etc. then I can look back to make sure I don't forget it and to see how much I have learned and grown.) A month or so after arriving in Brazil the first time, I wrote: "Looking for answers to questions regarding the roots of poverty - the best place to be is with the poor so I can learn their stories and begin to gain an understanding of their situation before trying to improve it." There is a kind of learning that comes from knowing people that you can't get from books. Some problems can be better understood when they are witnessed and experienced firsthand. And often the best answers and solutions come from those most familiar with the problems.

Random thoughts

This is probably about as random as they get since it is 12:30am, and I am wide awake since I went to bed "to pray" at 7:30pm and got quite a bit of "prayer sleep".

Yesterday we had an "impacto" here in the slum, an interchurch event that took place in the Cafezal plaza up the hill, near the health post. It was great to see the pastors from different churches working together to lead this rather unstructured, Spirit-led preaching/worship service in the middle of the public park.

I made chocolate chip cookies again this weekend...I seem to have more friends everyday. ;)

God doesn't tell us things just for the sake of telling us - He always has a purpose in what He tells us, He tells us what we need to know.

I'm in the process of asking God why He has told me some of the things that He has told me, what He wants me to do with that information.

Sometimes He tells us things just so we can pray about them, sometimes because we need to tell someone else, or sometimes because we need to do something about what He told us.

I miss carpet, the way it feels to walk on it barefoot.

Brazilians don't really say brrrrrrrrrrrrrr when they are cold, and now that the winter months are rolling in, I catch myself naturally saying it, sometimes rather loud...I must look kind of crazy. I have surveyed the other foreigners to make sure it is not just an American expression, and have found that Dutch and German people say brrrrr but with a heavy roll on the R but English people say brrr like I do, more like "bur" with no R roll.

I'm almost done reading Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider. I highly recommend it. It is re-inspiring me in my vision and big-picture calling, but also personally challenging me in some areas.

Sometimes I wake up thinking in Portuguese now...

Agora eu sei como trocar o idioma de meu teclado então dá para digitar em português se eu quiser. Tambêm agora sei como escrever melhor por causa de meu curso de português.

It's hard to talk/write in Spanish now because it is so similar to Porgutuese, I need to train myself to switch better.

One girl from my group who was really starting to show improvement was suddenly taken by the police to live with her mom on the other side of the city, due to her father abusing them. I hope she's doing okay, though I have heard the man living with her mom is abusive as well. We're sad we can't work with this girl any more...she was so closed at the beginning of the year that she would never talk and if we tried to talk with her personally, she would turn her head, shut down completely, and never look us in the eye. Just before being taken away, she had come so far that she was participating in all of the activities, enjoying herself, trying to write whenever we do written work (she doesn't know how or has some disability), and not only able to talk to us and look us in the eye, but also courageous enough to stay after to talk to us about some struggles she was having with other girls in the group. This girl and her siblings are so precious but have been through so much...I really feel God's heart for them.

Okay...I'm going back to bed now.

Lessons from Chocolate Chip Cookies

Some of you may remember reading a blog I wrote just over a year ago regarding my first attempt to make chocolate chip cookies here in Brazil during my time as a volunteer at the girls’ house. Basically I struggled to find some of the ingredients and accidentally ended up using yeast rather than baking soda, and it didn’t come out looking anything like normal cookies (but the girls still ate it). Since then I have not been brave enough to try baking much of anything here in Brazil, but this week I decided to give chocolate chip cookies another try as I learned the proper words for all of the ingredients and I wanted to make something special to serve at the 15th birthday party of one of the girls in my group. I still faced the challenge of a gas oven with no temperature gauge and a few improvisations in terms of ingredients, yet by some miracle they turned out absolutely perfect! I still wasn’t sure what the girls would think of them as chocolate chip cookies basically don’t exist here. To my surprise, when the girls tried them, they were shocked that I had made them because they thought they were professionally made. They asked for the recipe and even though I told them I just got it off of the internet, they determined my cooking was good enough that I can get married. (Here in Brazil it is normal to tell a single woman she can get married if her food is good – I like to say the same to single men to single things out a bit.)
After the birthday party was over and the four dozen cookies had been consumed in a matter of minutes, God used this experience to speak to me about my own progress since first arriving here in Brazil. When I first got here, I didn’t know hardly anything about the language, how to find my way around the city, where to buy things, how to cook, clean, and use appliances, etc. But after a year, this is really my home now. I know how to get around the city without getting lost (most of the time!), I know how to speak the language well, I know how to use so many things that were very foreign to me at first. Something that I failed at a year ago, I not only succeeded but excelled at now! Although there are still challenges with living here and navigating in a foreign culture, I have come a really long way in the past year and am now capable of mastering things I was completely clueless regarding before.

A very specific need of the Lighthouse

Here at the Lighthouse, we have been vehicle-less for quite some time, and last year staff were really praying for the means to purchase a new "kombi" or van/minibus for the house. We recently received an offering that covers 65% of the cost of a new VW minibus! That still leaves us with US$7500 to raise. Please prayerfully consider how you may be able to help the Lighthouse in this VERY practical manner. Having more than 40 people in a house and no form of transport is kind of tough, so please join us in our mission to get a minibus! :-)

If you would like to contribute from the US, you have two choices:

1) Make a tax-deductible contribution by sending a check to the following address:
YWAM
PO Box 3000
Garden Valley, TX 75771, USA

Make a note indicating that it is for YWAM Belo Horizonte - Center, Brazil, for the Lighthouse minibus fund.

The downside of donating this way is that it takes a couple of months for the money to go through the necessary process to actually end up in our hands here at the base. If you decide to donate this way, please send me an email to let me know so that we know to be expecting your donation.

2) If you don't care about being able to take a tax-deduction and would like your gift to be received immediately, you can make a wire transfer into the Lighthouse's bank account here in Brazil. Wire transfers usually cost about $50 so this is probably only worth it if you are making a larger gift. Please send me an email if you would like to donate this way and I can pass you the information regarding the bank account that you will need to make the wire transfer. That way I will also know to be watching our account so we can confirm when it comes through.

Studying Portuguese

Foreigners on staff here are given the option to study Portuguese half-time for the first 3 months. At first, I thought I didn't really need this as I already speak decently and can get better just by speaking more, but after giving it more thought, I realized that I have never learned how to read and write in Portuguese, and that is a valuable skill to have that may help me greatly in the long-term here.

I went a public university to take a placement test, and when the professor reviewed it afterward, he said I was right in between the Intermediate II and Advanced classes, but he suggested that I challenge myself by giving the Advanced course a try. I think did so well on the test because my Spanish background helped a lot in the grammar portions even though I have never learned proper grammar in Portuguese.

So I have been in this class for a few weeks now, and think I am surviving, though I feel everyone in the class is better than me! Everyone is either married to a Brazilian and/or speaks Italian, Spanish, or French as their first language, making Portuguese easier. They all speak so well! At first I felt a bit overwhelmed, but I feel the challenge has been good for me and I am really catching up. I am learning how to properly use the subjunctive tenses and everything from my spelling to my pronunciation is improving!

The class has also been good for me in terms of getting outside of the YWAM bubble and outside of the slum, putting me back into an environment much like that I was in during my classes in college, primarily with people hostile toward religion and especially Christianity.

Many YWAMers here are in these Portuguese courses...but I am the only one in the advanced course, so I am on my own in that sense!

Two class discussions have been very interesting for me: one on simpatias or superstitions and the other on social problems and what the government can do to improve things.

The class on simpatias was quite interesting, because we learned about many of the superstitions that people here in Brazil have, many within the Catholic church or spiritist traditions, or a syncretism of the two. There are many things that follow the following formula: if you want x, you do y and z for this saint. For example, Sao Antonio is the saint of romance. In June each year there is a celebration called the Festa Juninha (June/winter Festival), and it is supposed to be a good time to find that special someone. During this time, single women take their statue of Sao Antonio and place it upside down as a "punishment" for the fact that he hasn't provided them with a man yet, then go out to dance, and I guess only turn it back right side up if Sao Antonio comes through in providing a man.

As we discussed this and other various simpatias mostly connected to some kind religion, I couldn't help but think I am SO thankful that it is not like this with the God that I worship - it is different because I have a personal relationship with Him based on who He is. It isn't something that I just use Him to get what I want and just follow a formula to do whatever I need to do to get that. It is totally different! He blesses me not on the basis of what I do, but because of His love for me, and I love Him because of who He is. I don't have a statue of Him that I turn upside down to punish Him if I don't get what I want! Sometimes I struggle to understand if things don't go as I would like or the way that seems best in my eyes, but that does not stop me from loving Him or relating to Him, because He matters more to me than what is happening in my life. What a difference than the simpatias used to get things out of the saints!

The other class of particular interest to me was during our unit on politics. We got into a discussion regarding the main problems facing Brazil and what the government can do about it. Some of the biggest problems identified were poverty and social inequality. We discussed what the government can do to address these problems, and the best thing the class could come up with was improving the education system, yet that has its challenges and shortcomings. Basically, the conversation made me realize that I am here doing what the government can't do to bring about change in these areas. This was an amazing realization for me, because in the past when I have discussed these things it has always been a theoretical discussion, but now it is real, rooted in my experiences, and their are faces and stories I can relate to these large, abstract social issues. We also discussed problems like corruption in politics and the police force. And it reminded me why the kind of character transformation brought about by a genuine relationship with God is so key to broader social transformation. It is the only way to truly uproot social injustice and corruption. People will always find ways to get personal gain and take opportunity of any situation at the expense of others unless moral reasons and personal convictions as to why not to, and without God, people have no reason to hold those kind of convictions.