Developing A New Way of Looking at Life Pt. 1 By Murray

Hold on to your seat folks, this is a long one put the story is totally worth it! See if you relate to what this guy went through...

​Personal Experience:
Developing a new way of looking at life is a difficult process. 
Most of these lessons have been learned form hard-earned experience. Learning to view the world differently not because I wanted to, but to survive and understand, I had to. Much that happened during this time period was the result of God so re-ordering my world He had to speak in so many different kinds of ways just to get my attention. You see I had a problem, which many of us have of course, but mine was called performance orientation. What that does to a person is make them work so hard they just burn out. And burn out I did. I had been pastoring a youth church...

  at the time. There were about 250 kids involved. Half of these were in our 10 home groups. Let’s just say these were not your average kids. At least 50% were from broken homes, a good portion were off the streets of Vancouver. I had a good laugh one day when the local paper ran an article about pan handlers moving into Abbotsford. {Oh no! The invasion has begun!} These of course being some of my kids from God Rock, our youth church. They were definitely an eclectic bunch; some out of the New Age movement, some with gay parents. One teen had a mother who was a lesbian witch. Many were sexually abused. For ‘normal’ people to deal with having a bad day is to go home and watch TV and to try to forget about it. To many troubled youth dealing with a bad day is slicing your wrists. Lets just say it was hard, really hard. After one girl, coming out of a hard scene, was raped and ended up in the psyche ward and the other brother in jail, I began to lose hope. I began to wonder if they were really getting better. If God really cared or if I could really help at all.

Things can always get worse.
We had a big name prophetic guy come to our church for a conference. It was great, the presence of God was really strong! However it was the meeting with the leadership team that was interesting. I remember the staff meeting the day before. The head Pastor, Gareth, had just shared how his wife had had a strange but yet strongly compelling dream the night before. In the dream she was in the Southern States at night. She saw a woman on a bridge, the woman turned to her and said. “Help me, I’m trapped in Birmingham Alabama!” It didn’t make a lot of sense but suddenly I was fighting back the tears!!! What was going on? It really bothered me that I should get so emotional about such a strange thing.

That evening we had our meeting with the prophetic fellow and this is basically what he had to say; that we as a church had a chance to go down in history, either having been used of God in a mighty way, or missing it, like Birmingham Alabama. AAAAHHHHH!!! He then went on to say that the enemy was going to hit us with everything he had for the next 18 months and that we needed to work on intimacy with our spouses and with the Lord.

Let’s just say that after that meeting people wanted out of leadership quick. But life goes on, you just get on with your life and put the word on the shelf, try and forget about it. You can’t let a prophetic word run your life, if God is in it He will surely bring it to pass in His own good time.

Things suddenly began to change, it seemed like the presence of God was lifting, especially at God Rock. When your dealing with people who are so messed up and need all the help they can get the lifting of the presence of God is a horrible thing. To the youth at God Rock it felt like they could no longer trust the Lord with their issues. Not having a strong foundation of the father’s love, they began to overly rely on the home group leaders, many of whom were in their teens as well. We had had such rapid growth, we were overwhelmed and were trying to raise up and disciple home Group leaders as fast as we could.

Two months had gone by since the ugly prophetic word, Christmas had come and gone, it was time to prepare for the New Year. I still remember the first God Rock service of the New Year, the heat had been turned off and none of the chairs set up. If you weren’t dressed warm enough for sledding you weren’t dressed warm enough to be in the building! No one could stay in the building and there was nowhere for them to sit if they did. Now there is foreshadowing for you! What a way to begin the New Year.

Time went on and things went from bad to worse, to make a long story short at least three people had been in the psyche ward by May. Then, within two weeks all the home groups collapsed. Ten home groups in two weeks! One adult leader majorly burned our and had to go on anti- depressants, another fell heavily into the drug scene. Another leadership couple had their van stolen and their daughter, who was also a leader had a cancer scare. The lists of disasters went on and on.
In the end of spring we had a leadership meeting to see who would come back next September to help... three out of twenty five leader, God Rock was dead...the dream was over, I was devastated. These were the people I had been training, some of them for years, and they were walking away. It was with good reason mind you; who wanted to be a part of that party! But it destroyed me. All the people I had helped were getting worse, all the leaders I had invested in were walking a way. It was too much for me, I began to crack.

And the Lord took that crack in my defenses and walked through it.
The next day I went for a drive, the longest drive in history. I took the huge 12 person youth tent and I went all the way to Long Beach on Vancouver Island, all and all a twelve hour trip. It wasn’t like I had actually planned to go to the island; I just wanted the most remote place I could find, a place of rest for my soul, a place to lick my wounds. I drove until the sense of loss seemed far away, I drove until I felt better, little did I know that meant driving until I ran out of road, finally stopping at the pacific ocean.

The only way I could get any peace on this drive was by asking God to forgive me for anything that came to mind... judging people, being angry, pride etc.. I found a place to set up my tent...had a little time to walk the beach and went to bed.
I awoke in the morning to the strangest noise. It sounded as if there was a bear outside my tent. But no....it was...flying...flying around my tent, which was amazing because it was a pretty big tent! Since I had just woken up I thought I was imagining it but no, it wasn’t a dragon fly, it was loud like a bear! Suddenly a verse went through my mind, Isaiah 6:6-7. I quickly dug my bible out of my back-pack and looked it up.
Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with tongs from the alter.
And he touched my mouth with it and said: Behold, this has touched your lips; Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is purged.”
Isaiah 6:6-7

I remember sitting there stunned. I hadn’t felt the presence of God through any of this and it really hadn’t taken much time to happen. However I knew God had just given me a piece of the puzzle as to why my life and career were going the way they were. I somehow knew that this didn’t have anything to do with a lot of what I had been praying about the night before, it was about how I lived my life. I knew that the Lord would lead me as time went by and show me the sin that I couldn’t see.

Just to make the point again.
When you have lost everything it does seem to be easier to hear. I had had a successful ministry. I had grown a youth church from nothing to 250 in 5 years. I could reach kids few seemed to be able to reach. I was speaking at conferences and we were starting a youth church in downtown Vancouver. On paper it looked wonderful. But paper houses fall very easily. I hadn’t built this house on the Rock. Oh it looked sound enough but the season of testing was on and during the refining everything based on mixed motives is burned up. Don’t get me wrong the Lord is gracious and compassionate. But when the time comes, He knows how to play hardball as well.

I worked hard. As a matter of fact I was proud of my work ethic. And what it had accomplished. I had done it. {Never say that}. This is what the Lord was after, my fierce independence, my need to succeed to prove my worth. To let nobody beat me. To believe and fix everyone that God would let me. It didn’t work. Now I was left holding the ashes of all the years of effort with only, ‘I had been forgiven,’ but not even knowing for what.
 
The Power of a Paradigm Shift
The Great Author’s tool of foreshadowing had struck, it was time for a paradigm shift, time for a brand new worldview. The puzzle pieces to God’s mystery were on their way and soon the big picture that I could not see would emerge, God would turn this life crisis into a wellspring of hope.

It’s important to keep in mind Peter’s vision in Acts 10. Peter had no idea what was going on, the vision he had just had went against everything he held true as a Jew, Peter needed a paradigm shift to understand what God was trying to tell him. It wasn’t until God gave more information that things began to make sense. As God gave more information to Peter, Peter began to understand what the Lord was saying; in other words Peter put the puzzle together. Jesus established a new worldview in Peter by giving Peter puzzle pieces of confirmation along the way; all the events that happened to Peter on his journey to and with Cornelius added up to the big picture, the Gentiles were in the kingdom of God. {more on this in the nest section}

How well I remember the next puzzling event from God, the next puzzle piece in the big picture God was trying to help me see. I was out walking in Sumas Prairie crying out to God. I remember thinking how unfair it all was when the Lord gave me a picture of this metal-toothed monster...and I hated it! I knew it had something to do with God Rock, something to do with how it functioned but I didn’t understand. I knew intuitively that a part of the God Rock structure was that metal-toothed monster and it should not have been there. I just had no clue what it was!
The next clue, or puzzle piece, came when a bunch of people were praying for me. I saw a picture of me rolling this huge bolder up a hill. I was straining with all my might. The Lord let me know He never asked me to roll that bolder up that hill. I didn’t get it.

The plot now begins to thicken.
We had one ministry trip left to go that we were committed to do. It was away off in Montana, we had met a group from there at a conference and they had wanted us to come and minister to them. That Sunday our team was getting prayer to go when the Lord put me on the floor and spoke to me in my mind. His voice was very loud, as loud as I have ever heard. This is what He said. “I’ve beaten you.” His voice was full of compassion and love but there was no mistaking the meaning, what had happened at God Rock, it was him! Somehow I also knew that I would get more information as the trip began. I must say that I was stunned by this but all the clues or puzzle pieces given to me by God pointed to the fact that I needed to be forgiven and that I was rolling something I wasn’t suppose to be rolling. It was something in the foundation of my ministry that was wrong and damaging. I knew it fit. I knew it was right. I was in the wrong and the Lord had put a stop to something, I just didn’t know what it was.
Montana
The trip began well enough...but I was a desperate man. My world was shattered and I knew that I was being taught something important but I just did not get it. I was beginning to learn and watch for God to speak. The pieces would fit. As the pieces fit together I would soon see the picture of the problem that my eyes couldn’t yet focus on. I would have a new paradigm.

We had driven for 12 hours and were in four vehicles, about 20 of us all-together. I remember we had just crossed into Montana and everyone wanted to stop. We found the nearest gas station/ cafe and pulled over. It turns out that everything in Montana is also half casino and I didn’t want to wait at such a place. I got in my van, told the others that I would meet them at the next rest stop, and left. Not the best thing for the leader to do but I was not in the best way and there were others to watch the troops. For some reason I just had to get to the next rest area. I was driving, and driven to do it. It was a long trip to that rest area, about 25 minutes. I remember Neil, one of the young adults, asking how much farther when the Lord told me it was right around the corner. I still had enough faith at this time to tell Diane, one of the youth leaders on the trip, who was sitting beside me. We drove around the corner there it was, the rest area. I still remember seeing the sign, ‘REST AREA,’ and can still feel the impact of the words, as if someone had knocked the breath out of me. A significant moment was occurring, it was time to pay attention, another puzzle piece was about to be added, and this piece would be the one to snap things together so they made sense.

Once we had stopped, I was just standing there not knowing what to do.
I remember Terry, one of my leaders who had had an emotional crash walking up to me and apologizing for that crash {as if it were his fault}. As he spoke I looked over at a huge historical sign, the sign said ‘Iron Mountain Mine.’ I felt the Lord impress upon me to read this sign, that what had happened at God Rock was on the sign and that it was another trail marker for me on my journey. It’s probably important to note that at this point we were still planning to start God Rock up again, to fix the problem and wind up the ministry machine.

This is what the sign said;
Twelve miles from this rest area was Iron mountain mine and in 1897 it pulled out millions of dollars of ore in a year {of what I don’t remember any more} However a law was passed that stated that any mine without a secondary escape shaft had to be shut down for safety reasons. The mine was shut, they tried to start it up again but to no avail, all that is left today is collapsed tunnels and old crumbling foundations.

I was stunned by the information. It fit my situation perfectly. What was the Lord saying by this? That we couldn’t start again?
I read it over and over and pondered it in my mind just standing there staring. I must have looked quite the confused site now that I think about it.
After pondering it all for a while and in conjunction with the other things the Lord had all ready spoken this was my conclusion; As the mine was built 12 miles outside of the ‘rest area’ so was the leadership of God Rock built outside of God’s rest. 12 is always the number used in Scripture when referring to leadership and the foundation they give. i.e. 12 apostles, 12 tribes, 12 gates, 12 thrones etc. therefore God Rock had in its foundation ministry for identity, striving, pride...etc. Nothing could be built on this foundation, it wasn’t safe. Much of God Rock leadership needed success more than intimacy and relationship with Jesus.

This may seem like a lot of information from one little sign but it was the piece I needed to put the previous puzzle pieces together to form some kind of coherent picture. The boulder was me striving in my own strength, the metal toothed monster the result of my striving. I was now beginning to see what I needed forgiveness for. I was driven to succeed to prove my worth and it was affecting everything I did in the kingdom of God. I didn’t know how to rest in God, I didn’t know how to receive the love of God for who I was apart from what I did.

By now I had begun to keep track of all these strange physical occurrences. I was waiting to see how they all would connect, to get the big picture. It appeared I was starting to get it. I knew that I could still be wrong, even with what just happened I was completely willing to just crumple up my hypothesis and throw away. God would confirm it if it was him. We continued on our way and I knew that more information would be forth coming.

I didn’t have to wait to long.
Montana is really a beautiful state, prairie on both sides of the Rockies, which as a Canadian I found strange as we have all mountains on the West of the Rockies. The mountains and streams are phenomenal, a great place to hear the Lord, think, and to collect my thoughts.

One day I woke up with a picture of the rolling prairie in my mind. Again I heard the Lord speak really loudly in my spirit. So loud it could have been audible. He said, ‘Come out in the fields I want to meet with you today.’
So that afternoon I made some time and drove out into the prairie and sat on a rock. I waited. Nothing. I waited longer. Nothing. Oh well, maybe I would come back in the evening and see what would happen.

I went to the next event that happened to be a BBQ at the church. However this church was not your typical set up, it was formerly a driving range. The church had a big field in the back surrounded by wheat fields. (Can you see it coming?) I ate some food and played some hacky- sack until a fellow walked up to me who wanted to talk. He was in his late 40’s, had been a Ranger in the Vietnam war and, this I did not know, had a prophetic ministry to the people of the area. He had a word for me. I kindly listened not knowing what to think. This is what he had to say. “The Lord spoke to me about you the other day and these are the things he showed me; I saw a picture of you surfing a set of waves. You were in between sets and a bigger set was about to come in.” {Waves in this word represent working with the Holy Spirit as the Holy Spirit is often compared to water in Scripture. In this word riding the wave meant staying in God’s purposes. I had recently been on the Island and had planned to go surfing. I had stood and watched for awhile but it had been awfully cold. So hearing this analogy from a Montana mountain man caught my attention.}
He continued...“I see that you are caught between sets of waves and are in the rip tow right now, you are paddling and paddling to get out. The Lord says to you that you are striving. You are outside of his area of rest and if you don’t stop right now it’s going to get worse!”

I was stunned, realizing that here again was another piece of the puzzle and exactly what I thought God had been saying on the sign! I was outside of his area of rest, striving in ministry, striving to be a somebody and have value. I asked him if we could talk, I now had a lot of questions. He said to me, “Sure, lets go for a walk in the fields, I meet God there.” Exactly what the Lord had spoken to me in my room that morning! I think that was the point I began to cry and fell to the ground weeping.
We talked about a lot of things but especially intimacy with God, how anything built outside of his area of rest in not truly built on him because it wasn’t built on abiding with Him. We talked of the trysting place, an old fashioned term about where lovers would go and meet. And once again the picture of what God was doing began to unfold more and more, I was beginning to understand what He was after. Pure relationship based on love and intimacy, not working for Him but primarily being with Him. One of the last things my new friend said was that he believed that a lot of my false paradigms were based on things that had happened while growing up and were fear based, that God was going to uproot these issues and replant me in Him. That sounded great, little did I know that replanting can get hard.

{** It’s important to note here, that the revelation being given was to teach me new theology that was based on relationship to the Lord. I could really get into all that and the lessons learned but that is not the primary reason for this work. Suffice it to say that what I hope people will see here is the process of how revelation is given. The different ways it is given. And how it paints a picture. God gives us a new taste as we are ready and able to receive the next mouthful. The Holy Spirit is the great teacher and His job is to lead us in to truth and freedom. My purpose in telling this is not to describe the truth so much as the process so we can all understand how revelation, especially physical prophetic events flow in our day-to-day world. They do not supersede teaching, or the bible, or having mentors in our lives, or any other way the Lord speaks. But they are one of His relevant story telling tools and one we should be aware of. as He uses on His pallet when He paints the story of our lives and world.**}

Back At Home, Waiting For the Quick Fix
We arrived back at home and I waited for more information from the Lord on what to do. There were now about thirty young adults left of the 250 wounded wanting help, or least that is how it felt to me needing help myself.
Time went on and strange things began to happen to stuff I owned. My computer kept crashing, first the internet files, then the CD drive, and after that was all fixed the whole thing just crashed. As if this wasn’t enough my car quit working, and at the same time! All this crashing would push me over the edge and I would get angry. It was beginning to seem to me that whatever I put my hand to broke, in ministry and now in the rest of life...I was upset.

I went back walking on Sumas prairie again, talking to the Lord trying to understand. I looked up at Sumas Mountain, on the top I could see the radio tower from where I was. I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, I felt the Lord tell me to go up there. I had a lot of faith. Usually I think I would have doubted that voice but the way I had been hearing the Lord I had faith and I was on my way. I knew where Centennial Trail began on that side of the hill and up I went. I was singing to the Lord I felt this was it. It was over! God had given me the information I needed and this was going to be the end of it and things could get back to normal. Hallelujah! I was happy. I hiked along in a great mood singing to the Lord when suddenly I came to a clear cut. I was standing on the crossroad of two logging roads, both overgrown. The path was gone, there was no way to reach the towers on this path! I looked through the trees searching. It began to rain. I raised my head to heaven and shouted at the top of my lunges, “you can’t get there from here!” I was angry.

I began to descend the way I had come. A verse went through my mind at that point, something about following the ancient paths. It was in Jeremiah somewhere near chapter 7. I was too angry to care and I told God so. “How dare you do this to me, I trusted you. I can’t get there form here!”

I can’t get there from here.
Out of my mouth came the truth I needed so desperately to hear but still not seeing the purpose of this little hike or what it was suppose to teach me. It was once again the physical speaking of the invisible. It was a sign on the path of my journey of life. I thought I had it all figured out. I had interpreted this series of events to be that the radio tower was God communicating and all I had to do was get there. Maybe that was partly right, but God had a different idea, his point was that the way I was doing life, the path I was following could not bring me deeper into the Lord’s presence, my path was a dead end. Things needed to change. I needed to learn that my human strength was not going to be enough to get me to the center of God’s will. I needed to learn how to fail.
​
I went to the meeting at church that night despondent. Encouragement came in worship as I had a picture of an Indian parting the trees and revealing a path that was hidden. People were interested in what happened on my hike up the mountain. We were all in the same place, we all wanted to learn what we needed to do to follow the Lord in what he was teaching us. A few people prayed for me and a couple of them even had a picture of someone parting the trees to reveal a hidden path. One thing about revelatory people, as you get to know their character and accuracy over the years, you begin to establish deep trust with these people and as a pastor I had that. It was good to know that people were praying for me.
The next morning my friend Diane came over and God had given her a verse in the night. It was Jeremiah 6: 16
Stand at the crossroads and look;
Ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.

Read Part 2