A Sign From God

God’s had me take the most unusual jobs.

One of these jobs is holding a sign on a street corner, advertising for a local business, a seemingly mindless, demeaning job.

This is a unique journey God has me on, specifically tailored to where I was. Not everyone needs to hold a sign. But there is where God put me.

Now, being on the corner again reminds me of everything God has taught me in these thirteen years.

Being here reminds me of the breakings and dealings and victories that my obedience to God’s will has taught me.

I understand better why it’s so important to find God in the moment, because our moments become patterns, and our patterns become our life.

So much so, that as I pick up my sign and face the traffic coming from all directions again, it transports me back to all the experiences I have had doing this.

I began my journey into the high places of God thirteen years ago with a picture of what I was going to find.

All my efforts to accomplish my vision, my idea of how it should go, have mostly gotten in the way of God’s vision, God’s idea of how it should go.

This experience of holding a sign on a street corner was the perfect place for me to come to grips with the fact that I didn’t need everything else.

All that extra effort that kept my mind full, but my heart empty.

I wasn’t very good at it at first.

I kept wandering off, trying to find other things. I understood why so few stuck with God’s will. It is not easy for the flesh, nor does it make sense to the brain.

Following God’s will, whatever you do, is not easy for the flesh, nor does it make sense to the brain.

Those of us holding that sign, we thought maybe it was about us. We thought we were the main attraction.

So we performed tricks, showing off, thriving off people’s admiration.

But it was never about that.

God broke me of that over years as my pride and stupidity wore down my body, until my wrists would experience sudden pain in the middle of the night that was so intense, it would wake me up out of a dead sleep, and then gradually subside.

I stopped showing off during the day and the pain would leave.

Sometimes I would anyways, and it would almost immediately return.

God was dealing with me, waving a warning flag.

“Knock it off, John. It’s not about you. The spectacle of John is a distraction.”

Gradually, as I reluctantly let go of my circus moves, I started to see the people past my spinning sign.

Hungry. Tired. Listless. Teenagers, old folks, businessmen.

All kinds passed by, hundreds and thousands of them.

Gradually, I began to wonder how I could care for them.

So, on my sidewalk sanctuary, God started teaching me about prayer.

I doubted how effective prayer was, so God showed me it was, bringing people that testified of the effects of my prayers.

I made specific prayer requests, unaware of how God was going to meet them.

Then I watched as God used my simple obedience to answer those prayers for others, beyond my comprehension.

“God, give that hopelessly depressed person joy,” I prayed.

And later that same lady testified:

“I was driving and I was hopelessly depressed, and I saw a man holding a sign on a street corner on a grey, depressing day in the snow. It was the kind of day where EVERYONE was depressed, but he had joy! I realized that if he could have joy, I could, too!”

God taught me how to make my prayers more effective, teaching me to be still and wait on Him and only move as He moved me.

And, still, I was learning.

Learning how to respond to the people He brought to me, not dismissing the weirdos that approached me on the street, but continually learning how to let go of my understanding and be sensitive to His leading to speak His words.

All this time, it’s looked like I was working to help a business with their sales.

In reality, I was about my Heavenly Father’s business, learning how intercede and discern and speak to the people His heart was breaking for.

Not long before, I was chasing this idea of being a big businessman, with lots of things to do, lots of irons in the fire, filling my mind while my heart ran empty again.

So God had to take me back to the corner, crucifying my soulish efforts, my attempts to be somebody, back to the beginning.

Back to simplicity. Back to Him.

The many breakings of my self-righteousness and resentment came to light as I worked again with people who are different from me.

But as I picked up my cross again yet again on the street corner, I remembered none of it mattered.

Nothing mattered but Him and His voice.

Simplicity returned.

“Let your light shine,” God spoke to me this morning.

Thankfulness for all my breakings filled me today as I let my light shine on the corner. I poured out my thankfulness to Him, entering His presence.

Joy filled my heart again, joy simply to be in His presence.

On the corner again, I continued to stay sensitive to everyone God brought to me.

Instead of circus moves, I held my sign still so my sign could be clearly read by all and pointed the way to what it was all about—not me, not my moves, I was only a messenger.

As I ministered to God through my thankfulness and joy today on the corner, a truck pulled up beside me.

“I’m thankful you’re working and not begging,” the man told me, before handing me a $100 bill.

In his gesture, I felt God’s blessing, God ministering to me as I ministered to Him.

As I gratefully took the money, God spoke to me yet again.

I didn’t need to be a big businessman to find provision.

I simply needed to trust Him and stay in His Presence, following Him wherever He led me.

God has had me on the perfect school this whole time, far past my understanding, teaching me to bow, to make myself so little and insignificant.

To be just a sign waver, so I could decrease enough to give Him place.

I am still going through it, but I am so grateful.

I am in School, the School of Christ.

This is the obedience to God’s leading that brings forth the precious fruit of the earth.

Wherever you are, whatever God has you doing, He’s moving more powerfully through it than you realize.

I can truly see the reality of the verse: “whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your heart.”

As you and I both continue to seek God in the individual classrooms He has us in, continuing to be whole-hearted and look through Heaven’s eyes, we see everything differently.

We can glimpse Heaven’s plans through the human toil.

Comprehending and tracking with His divine lessons through the experience makes everything worth it.

It’s a never ending schooling that becomes more amazing as it goes.

Remember When?

Memory can be a powerful tool. But right in the middle of the trials and dealings of life, it can be easy to lose focus on where God is in the middle of it.

And when you lose focus on that, pretty soon you can look back on your experiences and all you remember is the bad things!

God says: “Put Me in remembrance” (Isaiah 43:26). That’s important!

I’ve been touched by powerful testimonies of friends.

These spiritual giants I have known have gone through miraculous, deep things where God was transforming their hearts and using them to transform everyone around them.

However, years later, it broke my heart to see how these friends forgot what God was doing.

Pretty soon all that got prioritized in their memory are the hard things, all the afflictions they were going through at the time.

It’s appalling, and incredibly sad.

In the Old Testament, whenever God would move spectacularly in the Israelites’ lives, God would ask them to create a monument to memorialize the event.

You might think this is pretty stupid.

Who would ever forget how God parted the Jordan River miraculously? How the priests took the Ark of the Covenant and took it to the middle of the raging Jordan River, only to find their feet were on dry land?

How, as long as those priests held the Ark of the Covenant as instructed by the Lord, the entire congregation of Israelites passed over to the other side? Who would forget that?

It’s way easier to forget than you’d imagine.

Last year, I saw a friend at Thanksgiving. I told him: “man, it’s been a month since I’ve seen you last.”

“By now, I figured you’d be a completely different person.”

“Why is that?” my friend asked me.

“The last time I saw you, you told me about how Jesus walked into your room a few days before that.”

“I did?”

I stared at him. “Yes–” Had he seriously forgotten?!

“I think I vaguely remember that,” my friend said slowly. “What else happened?”

“Just before I saw you last, you told me Jesus had walked into your bedroom one night, and sat down on your bed.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yes. He asked you why you didn’t believe you were anointed. Then you told me you responded: ‘why me? What makes me so special?’

“Then Jesus said: ‘why not you? I’ve called everyone. You responded.’ “

“It’s starting to come back to me,” my friend said.

The conversation scared me. As miraculous and incredible as God moves in our lives, if we don’t hold onto it, we can still forget and turn away from God.

Revelation says: “they overcame him(the accuser of the brethren, or satan) by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony”.

Our memories make up the building blocks of our lives.

I was going through some trials recently. A freak wind damaged a key piece of equipment I was using. Shortly afterwards, I got into a miscommunication that ended unpleasantly.

In the middle of it, God kept speaking: “Keep Me in remembrance”.

It’s easy for to fixate on the trials of it. But if I do that, those awful things become my memory of it–which again, is one of the building blocks of my life.

God was in the middle of it, but I had to testify of what He was doing.

That’s because God told me to, and obedience to God commands a blessing.

But it’s also because I don’t want to clutter up my heart with bad memories.

What was God doing?

Teaching me to respond correctly, whether I was needing to move quicker than the freak wind or respond differently to my friend to prevent the miscommunication.

The devil wants to rob you of how God is moving in your life.

As God moves, memorialize the event and tell everyone of how big your God is!

God will be honored, you’ll be blessed, and you’ll be shocked by how much more you’ll notice God in your life as you testify of Him!

Giving It All by Percy

 

I was selling something the other day when an old car pulled up. A mother and daughter got out and walked up.

I could tell there was a different spirit on the daughter. A seriousness I rarely see in someone that young.

As I showed her what I was selling, I could tell she didn’t have enough. She looked over her money , shook her head, then looked up into my eyes.

She then said something I’ve heard a thousand times but in a spirit of utter certainty: “I will be back”.

It caught me off guard how much she packed into those words. I knew she was telling the truth. It struck me so much I remarked about it to a friend.

Awhile later, the same beat-up car came back. I prepared myself to sell a small quantity. But I felt the Lord stop me, and somehow I knew they were coming for all of it.

The daughter got out and started handing everything to me.

One dollar bills, five dollar bills, and finally, a medicine bottle filled with ten dollars in quarters.

They had gone and scraped together everything they had.

I was handing over the entire purchase when the daughter ran back to the car.

I was shocked to see her coming back with money in her hand.

With her last few dollars, she was giving me a tip.

As they left, I heard the Lord speaking clearly about the widow in the Bible who gave everything she had.

That’s the heart God is looking for.