A Van for the Douglas Clan

April 15, 2010 at 10:57 pm (faith, foundation, journey)
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This is the van we are believing God for. We have sowed for others to get what they need, and we believe that God will provide what we need. When Jesus needed a donkey to ride into Jerusalem for the Triumphal Entry, a donkey was right there at his disposal. When other people of faith have needed vehicles, houses, money, etc., God has provided them. Our whole family has been praying for a Savana van for about eight years. We sowed for it, so we don’t believe we will have to go into debt for it. So please pray with us for the provision of this real need.

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Doing Spiritual Warfare and Getting Set Free

April 15, 2010 at 3:22 am (faith, foundation)
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Wow, my brain has been turned on! We did some spiritual warfare and deliverance two nights ago, and since then I’ve had all kinds of ideas about ways to do things. I have figured out how to do things that I’ve had on to-do lists for months but just couldn’t seem to get accomplished. Suddenly, I know how to work things out that I just couldn’t get a handle on before.

Shawn identified some family curses that had been passed down to him through my side and through Gary’s side of the family. He shared them with us. Gary led us in prayer to break all of those curses in Jesus’ name, and I have felt different ever since. Shawn broke them over himself before he told us what had happened, but Gary went ahead and broke everything over all of the kids, too.

This is not the first time we have experienced deliverance and freedom from curses. We had always been under a spirit of poverty during our whole marriage. No matter how much money we made, it always felt like we were putting it in a bag full of holes. We knew what the Word says about how God wants to bless His people with prosperity and abundance, but we never saw it happening for us. We were faithful church attenders and very active in the church. We tithed and gave offerings. We were honest in our financial transactions. We didn’t spend foolishly. But we still couldn’t get ahead.

We finally got some CD’s from Arthur Burk about breaking curses off of your life. He is the founder of Plumbline Ministries. The Seven Curses CD’s were the ones we listened to. They also have renunciations you can go through after hearing about all of the curses. Gary and I went through and renounced all of the curses mentioned. Not long after that, everything changed for us financially. Someone surprised us with a gift of $20,000 not too long after that. Gary got a job that paid a whole lot more than he was making before. We were able to move into a house that was like new and big enough to accommodate our large family. We can buy what we want when we want – in moderation, of course. We don’t have too much month and not enough money any more. We don’t have to rely on food banks or thrift stores, although I still like to go to Goodwill and consignment shops. 😉

Basically, life is much easier and more enjoyable now than it was before we broke those curses. While I was in a Prophecy Room at IHOP-KC, one lady told me, “The time will come when you will be able to breathe again.” Well, that time has come. And I sure appreciate the peace and calm that God has blessed us with.

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How to Hear God

April 15, 2010 at 2:37 am (faith, foundation, journey)
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If you want to learn how to hear God’s voice, I highly recommend the book Surprised by the Voice of God by Jack Deere. Its subtitle is How God Speaks Today Through Prophecies, Dreams, and Visions. It is available here. The author came out of the cessationist camp and landed squarely in the middle of the charismatic Vineyard Christian Fellowship, even being mentored by the founder of that ministry, John Wimber. He also wrote Surprised by the Power of the Spirit in which he describes how that transformation took place.

In Surprised by the Voice of God, Jack Deere gives many examples of God speaking to people in multiple ways in the Bible and in contemporary life. He tells how to accurately hear God speak through prophecies, dreams, visions, and other forms of divine communication. As a biblical scholar, he points out things that we laymen might miss in our regular Bible reading. For example, he goes through the book of Acts and shows that, with the exception of chapter 17, every chapter contains an example of, or a reference to, supernatural revelatory communication from God to his servants. He also tells fascinating stories of real people whose lives have been profoundly impacted by hearing God speak to them. And he shares personal experiences of hearing God speak to him in a variety of ways and the effect it has had on his spiritual life. He writes in a very personal, engaging style and reveals a sense of humor and humility you might not expect from a theology professor. I really enjoy reading his books.

My personal journey of learning how to hear God’s voice began when I realized that I was never sure if I was hearing from God or from my own mind or from the devil or what! I asked the Lord to help me hear Him better. Gary had just lost his job at the end of 2001, and I asked God to do this for me because I knew that His people really need to be able to hear His voice and know it’s Him, especially as we get into the last days and deception gets stronger. So I prayed for God to speak to me clearly. The thought came to me, “Buy yourself a new dress.” I laughed. I thought, “I don’t buy myself clothes. Everything I get is for the kids. I don’t buy dresses. I don’t even wear dresses! I don’t want to buy myself a new dress. Gary just lost his job. We have no money. And I’m supposed to go buy myself a new dress?” So I realized it must be God telling me that, because I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it myself. So I told Gary what had just happened, and he said, “Let’s go shopping.”

We went to Elder Beerman’s, and they just happened to be having Clover Days sales. They had reduced prices on their most expensive dresses, so that you could buy a $100 dress for $10. I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited. I started trying on all these fancy dresses. Most of them were long dresses, and I wondered where I could even wear them. I decided that I really liked 3 particular dresses – 2 long, fancy ones and one more practical knee-length dress that I could wear to church. We bought all 3 of them and took them home. I felt so good about my bargains, and it was fun having some new dresses in my closet. The next morning I woke up to hear these words: “I only told you to buy one dress.” Oh no! I asked the Lord to forgive me for disobeying Him and asked what I should do about it. I knew that I had to take two of the dresses back. But which two? I prayed and asked the Lord and tried to figure out with my mind which dress would be the right one to keep. The logical choice was the one I could wear to church. But somehow I didn’t think that was what He wanted. I started to understand that when I ask God His will, I’m not supposed to use my mind to figure out what makes the most sense. I’m really supposed to listen to what He says. I just couldn’t figure out which dress I was supposed to keep, so I asked the Lord to bypass my mind and speak to my spirit. When I did that I knew I was supposed to keep the red dress. We drove back over to the store and took the other dresses back and got the money back for them. My favorite one had really been a sparkly sapphire blue long dress, and I secretly wished I could have kept that one, but it was not to be. The whole thing turned out to be a real test of obedience for me.

After that, I started really paying attention to my spirit and what God was saying to my spirit instead of mentally figuring out what made sense to me whenever I was supposed to be consulting God about something. I read several books. One was by Joy Dawson called Forever Ruined for the Ordinary available here. It was an eye-opening book in which she talked about ways of seeking God’s will that are similar to the Urim and Thummim that the Old Testament priests used. She taught that we need to put our soul and our flesh in submission to our spirit. From her book, I learned to pray that God would bypass my mind and speak to my spirit- that it was okay. When I did it earlier, I wasn’t sure it was right. I learned to ask God yes or no questions. I learned that we need to bind anything that would keep us from hearing God speak to us. Then I learned that we can feel and hear our spirit somewhere near our stomach region. We started asking God specific questions about whether we should go to a certain place or if we should do a certain thing. We would phrase it as a question that could be answered yes or no. We started to hear in our spirits the answer to the question. We learned to stop thinking and start listening with our spirits.

We have been doing this for a couple of years now, and it’s getting easier to hear with our spirits. After we hear His answer, it’s up to us to obey even if what we heard seems crazy. The Lord has used this to give us such assurance that we are really hearing from Him and not just muddling along in life, hoping that we’re pleasing Him and doing His will. He has taken us through some really hard times, but being able to hear clearly from Him has made it easier than it would have been and has helped us to make right choices when they seemed to be illogical and even harmful to us. We know that we’re hearing from God and not some other spirit because we bind anything that would keep us from hearing from Him. This includes demonic spirits. We know that we’ve been hearing His instructions because He has delivered us from an impossible situation of homelessness, hopelessness and despair and has brought us into a place of abundance, prosperity and joy.

You CAN hear God’s voice! You have to learn a whole new way of listening, though – with your spirit, not your mind.

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Spirit-led Scheduling

March 31, 2010 at 8:56 pm (faith, family, homeschooling)
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I have 10 children from 19 mos up to 19 yo. I don’t have things down perfectly. Sometimes it feels like I can only either get school done
or get the house clean. I have a few things that have been helping me lately. I’m always working on this. One thing that has helped me get the kids to do more chores is http://www.chorebuster.net It divides the chores among the kids after I filled in the ones that needed to be done and
how often each needed to be done. It allows you to give the younger ones fewer and easier chores. But the kids accept the assignments as fair, because they know a computer assigned them, not me. And each of them gets to learn how to do each chore at their ability level. It takes some time to set it up, but then the program works automatically to assign chores each week. I have an ideal schedule made up, but we hardly ever follow it. Chores are supposed to be done right after breakfast. Then I do together school with the 6 oldest, which consists of my reading aloud to them. I do Bible and History, using books from the Sonlight reading list or other books that are related to the unit we’re studying. I pray and ask the Holy Spirit to lead our homeschooling each day, then I do pretty much whatever I think of. Without the help of the Holy Spirit, I can’t think! So whenever a plan or title comes into my mind, I figure that’s Him! I also use the Narrated Bible and Genesis: Finding Our Roots and other books that Heart of Wisdom recommends to do our Bible time. We pray together to start things off. We put our spiritual armor on first thing. I have the 10-year-old and the 8-year-old work on Phonics and Math on their own during this time.

I’ve gotten a lot of help from www.cindyrushton.com for scheduling and doing unit studies and notebooking and lapbooking. This is the schedule I used 3 years ago. I put the 4 oldest together to try to get most things done, then they did math and language arts on their own. Then I grouped the 6 and 8 year old together for some things. The twin 3-year-olds sometimes did preschool with the 6 and 8 yr. olds. They liked being teachers. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t. The older kids took turns watching the baby while I was reading to them. If the chores hadn’t been finished before school, I had them do them after school. But by that time, my husband was usually home from work, and we had to fix supper. I’m getting the older ones to help with that. And a big thing that someone suggested that really helped me was to have the older kids do their own laundry.

My 16 year old prayed about what his responsibilities should be, and he said the Lord told him to clean the dining room table every day, vacuum around the dining room table and the living room and do the dishes every day. Those are the main things that make the house look company-ready. Since he started doing these chores things have looked pretty good most of the time. If we know someone is coming, usually it doesn’t take too long to make things look pretty spiffy, by my standards! My standards aren’t very high after all these years and all these children, but I know what’s livable for us and what’s reasonable for me to expect.

I am doing school mostly with just Bible, Math and living books. It’s working for us. I feel really good about what my children are learning. We talk about relationships with others, too, and walking in love and forgiveness. Some days we just talk about what the Lord has been laying on my heart or my oldest son’s heart. But I still feel like they’re learning the most important things on those days.

We don’t have a whole lot of fellowship with others. The ones who drop in on us are single people! It’s really hard to get together with other families right now. But I consider it a season that will come to an end some day, and then we can have people over for dinner and go to others’ houses. My main ministry right now is to my own children and husband. I’ve finally accepted the fact that this is enough. God is pleased with me.

As far as crafts and nature study, I think I will take days off from the regular
schedule and devote most of a day to these extra activities.

My menu planning is: I make a list of meals for the week, make a shopping list, go grocery shopping on Sat. or Sun. and then try to remember to look at my list every day when it’s close to meal time! My husband and I go grocery shopping together. It gives me time away from the house and gives us time together.

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What Does Noah’s Ark Have to Do With Going to the Moon?

February 11, 2010 at 1:36 pm (faith, homeschooling)
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(Post originally written Nov. 17, 2007)

We’ve been studying Genesis, but we’re not moving through it very fast. We keep going back to Noah and the Flood! I don’t know why exactly. I just keep finding resources about it, and they’re too good to not share with my children.

We’ve read these books:

The Secret on Ararat

by Tim LaHaye and Bob Phillips

The Heavens Before by Kacy Barnett-Gramckow

Sequel to The Heavens Before – about Nimrod and the Tower of Babel – He Who Lifts the Skies

A Rift in Time by Michael Phillips.

I had the kids watch the video In Search of Noah’s Ark.

It had the same information that was in The Secret on Ararat.

There have been so many people through the years who have seen the Ark on Ararat and have even gone onto the Ark, that it’s hard to believe that we’ve been so deceived to believe that it’s not even there.

The kids loved reading The Secret on Ararat because it was full of action and suspense. They were begging me to read more chapters. They are also loving The Heavens Before. We have really been immersed in what it must have been like in the Days of Noah. It was awful when every man’s thoughts were evil continually. It’s hard to imagine everybody in the world, except one family, being evil. How God must have grieved. And how sad and frustrated Noah must have felt to be preaching and warning all the time for 120 years and not having any converts, except perhaps for 3 women who became his daughters-in-law. Talk about an unsuccessful man! Or was he unsuccessful? I’d say he was the most successful man of his time! He sure came out on top in the end. He was the only one who survived. And he became the father and grandfather of everybody on Earth. What is the measure of your success? Obedience to what God has told me to do. That’s the measure of my success.

There are so many lessons to learn from these stories in the Old Testament. I’m amazed at the way God leads our studies. Because of our studies of Noah’s Ark, I started reading about the astronaut James Irwin. He led expeditions to Ararat to look for the Ark because of the spiritual experience he had while spending time on the moon. He felt God’s presence there with him on the moon. He came back to Earth with a new mission: to tell everyone that God is real and He loves us and we should be so thankful for this wonderful home He gave us to live on. He felt at home everywhere he went on Earth after his time on the moon.

I wonder if he felt a bit like Noah, though. I think he was pretty well-received in the churches he went to, but I wonder how the scientific world received his message. As skeptical and humanistic as the scientific establishment is, I doubt if they gave him a very warm reception. No matter that he knew as much as they did and more, having been an astronaut, and having been on the moon; they still reject his message and deny the existence of God.

Science was started by Christians. I pray that Christians can take back the ground they have lost and get the funding and the platform they need to make a difference in what is taught in public schools and in the media.

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God’s Provision is Unstoppable, We Now Have Beds that are Unpoppable!

September 13, 2009 at 12:29 am (faith, family, foundation, journey)
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We have real beds now! We have been sleeping on air beds for about a year now. We left all of our old, decrepit mattresses in Kansas City when we moved to Belleville. And we knew that we would only be staying in the house in Belleville for a short time, so we just bought air beds rather than mattresses and beds. We wanted to save money, and we wanted to have less stuff to move when the time came to go somewhere else.

But we’re feeling more settled here. We have a longer lease here. So we’re getting some real furniture. Gary and I got a mattress and box springs last week from Weekends Only, which is only open on the weekends and has great prices. Check it out at http://www.weekendsonly.com. As I type this, Gary is putting together bunk beds we bought there for the younger boys. Yesterday, we rented a truck to haul the bunk beds and to pick up furniture from our friend, Carolyn, in St. Louis. While we were at Weekends Only, our friend, Marc, called about white metal bunk beds he just bought at a garage sale for $35. We went over and got them and loaded them with the ones we had just bought. Now we had bunk beds for two of the boys and bunk beds for two of the girls. When we go to pick up Carolyn’s furniture, we will have a whole bedroom set for the big boys. Anna got a new (to her) bedroom set last week and painted it herself (pink, of course!). We just need a couple more beds and everyone will have a real bed.

The boys' dreaded air bed

The boys' dreaded air bed

The little boys' new bunk beds

The little boys' new bunk beds

Poppable air bed - no more!

Poppable air bed - no more!

The girls' new bunk beds

The girls' new bunk beds

Anna's new bed and night stand - more pics to come as she finishes painting

Anna's new bed and night stand - more pics to come as she finishes painting

No more beds that leak air or get popped when the overzealous young ones get too rowdy and treat our beds like trampolines. We went through about 20 air beds during that year. That got pretty expensive, not to mention the trouble we had getting out of bed in the mornings when the middle of the bed sank down to the floor! And the twins were in the doghouse more than they were out of it while we had air beds.

Thank you, Lord, for Your abundant provision!

I’ll post more pics after we get our haul tonight from our friend in St. Louis.

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God’s Timing: Man Says, “Too Late”, God Says, “Just Wait”

September 3, 2009 at 9:47 pm (faith, family, foundation, journey)
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I was so upset about not being out of the house by the time the owners returned. I was stressing out in a big way, lots more than I usually do. The kids wondered what my problem was. They know that God always takes care of us, so they couldn’t understand why I was so upset.

Well, part of my problem was that I had actually made a plan in my mind for how we would get out of the house early enough to come back and clean the house after all the kids were out and nobody would be there to mess it up right after I cleaned. We actually found a house and got the keys by the 15th of July, so it looked like everything was going according to plan. But then the management group didn’t clean the house like they said they would. It was going to be a step down from the quality of living we had gotten used to. We would have had lots of space, but the appliances were older and didn’t even work, in some cases. The house still smelled like dog, and there was still dog hair in the carpet. The rental management group, Strano and Associates, said they would get everything cleaned and in working order, but they didn’t do it. They told us it had already been cleaned, and when I found dog hair in the corners and in the middle of the room, it didn’t seem to faze Linda Linder, who runs the property management group. She still insisted that the carpets had already been professionally cleaned. She had told me that the dishwasher was being replaced because it didn’t work. But then my husband got a call from a repairman who said that he was supposed to go fix the dishwasher.

There were so many things that we didn’t really like about the house that I went straight back to the rental management office after getting the keys and told her that we couldn’t live there. Linda told me that I couldn’t get out of the contract. We held our ground until they finally let us out of the contract about 2 weeks later. We would have hated living in that dark and dirty house. That kitchen was not a happy place, and I spend too much time in the kitchen to have one that is dark and dreary.

We went through all of that and then we had to try to find a house in less than a week and get out of the house we were in by August 1. All of that stress was just too much!

I went to the park with Emma one evening and met a woman named Crystal who told me about her church that met just across the road from our subdivision in the Elks building. At first, I wasn’t interested because “churchy” church is a real turn-off to us. But she told me a little bit about it, and I realized that I needed someone to pray for me and we needed someone to come alongside us and pray for us to find the right house at the right time.

So we went to the church that Sunday. They greeted us at the door and told us that the pastor was out with a kidney stone and the lady I had met at the park wouldn’t be coming, because her husband had a kidney stone and she was taking him to the hospital. The worship leader was gone. The service was not going to be typical, so we shouldn’t judge the church by what we saw that day. Well, the people were very friendly, and we enjoyed the fellowship, so I went back to the Tuesday prayer meeting. I met the pastor and his wife that night. They were very nice and genuine. I really liked their views of the purpose of Christian people gathering together. Not church as usual, but coming together like the New Testament church, working to help the poor and needy. They want to buy the Elks building they rent, but it will cost lots more money than they have. They are trying to raise the faith level of the people so that they can all pray and believe for the amount of money they need. They understand the power of agreement and the laws of sowing and reaping and other principles of faith that we learned along our journey. The building has a kitchen and lots of other amenities that would work well for feeding people and helping people in the ways they have in mind. The sermons have been about faith, and they have been so confirming and uplifting. I say “amen” a lot throughout the sermons. And our heart is to help poor and oppressed people, too.

The church prayed for us that first Sunday. I started calming down and getting my faith back in order. I stopped yelling and getting upset about every little thing. The kids were thankful, I’m sure. Not to mention Gary. It was nice to know that people were praying for us. I knew that God was at work, but I didn’t know what He was doing.

I really wanted to be out of the house by Aug. 1, but it was impossible. We couldn’t find a house to move into, thanks to occupancy limits in neighboring towns that were unfriendly to large families – discriminatory, if you ask me. (We have encountered lots of injustice along the way.) On Aug. 2, the owners came to our door and rang the doorbell. It was one of those dreaded moments when your worst nightmare is about to come true. I’ve had a few of those in the last several years. I immediately told them that I had tried to get us out of there, but I just wasn’t able to. They assured me that everything was okay. Their stuff was still in Israel and they were staying with a brother-in-law. So it was okay that we were still in their house. They gave us 2 more weeks to find a place to move to. They understood our situation and were not upset at us. OH, heavy sigh and lots of happy dancing, and even a hug or two!

We finally found a house that we would be allowed to occupy and got the final word of the owners’ approval on Aug. 13. We rented a truck the next day, loaded it all day long, took the first load to the new house at midnight and went back to pick up the rest of the kids and the rest of the big stuff after midnight. We were out of the house in 2 weeks, just like they wanted. But there was still some stuff in the house that we couldn’t get because of lack of time and manpower. At 9:00 that Friday night, I knew we were going to need help. I called the pastor and asked if he could get some people and trucks together to help us move the rest of our stuff the next morning. He said he would do that. Gary and I had to take the moving truck back by morning, so we did all we could do that night and then returned the truck at 5:00 AM. We then went back to the house and did some more. We didn’t get in bed until 7:00 AM. We knew we couldn’t get up and get back over to the house by 10:00, the time I had told the pastor we would meet him. So we texted him and told him to cancel that time, and I called him later and asked if we could possibly do it Sunday instead. He said he would announce it, and we would do it after church at about 2:00. He was so nice about it and very willing, actually anxious to help us. We walked into the service just as he was announcing that they needed people to help a family move. He said, “Oh, here they are now” and everybody looked back at us. It was perfect timing. Nobody really knew us yet, but now they knew who he was talking about.

At 2:00, we were at the house, and several pickup trucks and a trailer pulled up and lots of people hopped out to help us finish our move. The pastor took charge and organized an assembly line to get our boxes packed into the trailer and then each pickup truck. They worked so fast and efficiently that everything was loaded in no time. We saw how the Body can work together to make things easier and less stressful when they have leadership that encourages such things. After all of that, they told me that they would come back and help me clean whenever I wanted to do that. We set the day for Tuesday. They came and cleaned the whole house just the way I had envisioned being able to do it with the house empty. But they did it in 3 hours. It would have taken me several days. And I couldn’t have gotten it as clean as they did even if I had a couple of weeks. (Cleaning is not my forte.)

I needed to do some laundry and asked the owners if I could use their washing machine and dryer a little bit longer. I used it Tuesday night for the last time, and we were out of the house for good. We never could have accomplished it without the church’s help. We have had a bad taste in our mouths about “churches” because of the way we’ve been treated in the past, but this group of believers has been better than family to us.

The owners started getting picky about things that were broken and saying that we needed to fix things ourselves. We had already offered half of the deposit because we knew there were some repairs that would have to be made. They kept insisting that we make the repairs or hire someone to do it. We kept telling them to take it out of the deposit. We were able to get an estimate from the pastor who helped us clean, since he was a carpenter with 26 years of experience, that showed that the repairs would cost far less than half of the deposit. We were being generous in our offer, which is what we wanted to be. It put my mind at ease, knowing that we were being more than fair in offering half of the deposit.

If we had gotten out of the house by Aug. 1, I would never have visited that church. I wouldn’t have met Crystal. I wouldn’t have had anybody to call for help when we just couldn’t do everything ourselves. I wouldn’t have had peace of mind about what’s happening with the owners and their demands. I wouldn’t have had the prayers of the saints that have carried me through another uncertain time of accusation and expectations that are impossible to fulfill.

I keep facing these fears, and I would so much rather not have to go through them. But the Lord keeps making me go head to head with people opposing us and falsely accusing us and expecting more from us than we owe them. People seem to think that we’re naive and gullible because we’re kind and compassionate. They try to take advantage of us and take from us what God has blessed us with. But God always helps us to see what is going on and defends us from their schemes. We are still in the middle of the conflict with Strano and the owners of our former house. Strano kept $822 of what we paid them for the house that we never occupied for even a moment. We never moved one thing into that house. We barely spent one hour in that house, but they made us pay $822 rent for the last half of August. And we don’t have our half of the security deposit yet. We are waiting, again, but God is always faithful. His timing is perfect. You just have to wait for it.

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