For this post, I’m gonna go sideways for a minute. Here’s postcard #3:
There are two significant things that I learned in grad school that were taught indirectly (I may have shared something like this in a previous post):
Everyone is someone you can learn from. Everyone holds wisdom about something, and we should pay attention to it. I often think about this because we look to gurus or teachers for wisdom. I learned a lot from reading and listening to lectures, but I gained the most from my classmates. Learning sideways (peers) and down-ways (those we naturally assume we are more intelligent than, like children, those slightly younger, or who have not yet walked a particular path in their adulthood - like parenting teenagers) instead of up-ways (the all-wise ones who teach, preach, lead, get Dr’s degrees, gurus, or those ahead on the journey) is one of the upside-down ways of the Kingdom. We are all made in the image of God, so this could be seen as a part of that. But we often ignore whole sets of people when we think of learning. Here are some examples: singles, children, BIPOC (black, indigenous, and other people of color), people with disabilities, and special needs, and more. I’m certain my list is not exhaustive.
A natural way to be in the world is to think hierarchically and gravitate toward the ones with power so that we can be powerful. This is the way of the world, so we often assume this posture toward others incidentally. However, I am not sure the Kingdom is hierarchical. God is most high, but might He be most low? By that, I’m not inviting heresy to rule, but I’m reflecting on our God becoming a man. He is alpha and omega. What God comes down and becomes a man like one of us? Only one. This is especially relevant during this Easter season and when thinking of Jesus riding a donkey.
This is why I think Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). One of the works of the incarnation is that we are now all equals, no matter what station we hold. In Christ, we have it all, even when we don’t on earth, but we live in the Kingdom now. We are meant to live in the Kingdom today with all the tools and resources given to us. The only hierarchy I see Kingdom-wise is God being God, but also He is with us and like one of us, and we are like one of him as his apprentice/disciple (yet also, we are not gods). I’m not great at explaining mysterious things, so I hope something in this paragraph makes sense without being out there theologically.
I can trust the learned wisdom of the soul. The books and resources that I learned the most from were when they confirmed what my soul already knew from experience. I can say that I’ve been able to make connections from the world all my life, but my communication about how I made the connections has been poor for most of my life. I just knew things. By connections, I mean I could conclude that one thing was like another. My mind would leap 2 or 3 steps ahead. Adults would ask me what I meant, and I internalized this as saying something dumb. Shy Jamie stopped sharing her insights because she didn’t know how to help people get from point A to B to C to D. She knew A led to D, but this inability to communicate when asked further questions helped me distrust myself and hide my thoughts from others, at least some of the time.
I was taught to be in the world in such a way that I have always lied to myself and others and thought it was how everyone did it. I think most of us do a fair amount of self-deception. I mean, I tried to be an honest person, but when my husband would ask, “What is wrong?” and I would say, “Nothing,” he would call me a liar (folks don’t try this at home). Pleasing people means never being allowed to be yourself, so “nothing” felt like an appropriate response because I wasn’t allowed to be anything other than accepting of whatever everybody else needed or wanted. It’s the only way I knew how to be in the world. A hot mess, yes. However, aspects of my faith tradition also seemed to reinforce this. I was remiss to trust myself about things I knew that seemed to go against the grain of what was normative within my tradition. I’d learned how to conform or camelionize myself to fit in.
Reading others’ words about things my soul had already come to know taught me that I can trust at least a measure of myself - that part that is in tune with the divine.
Why am I sharing all this when I wanted to talk about Faith Streams? I wanted to share because writing to educate sometimes feels hierarchical to me, and I wanted to acknowledge my dissonance in just sharing information. Much of my teaching is out of a deep well from within, which seems a little strange, but I’ve learned I can trust that part of me that knows what it knows because of my “with God” life. I’m trying to weave understandable connections, which means I probably over-explain. {Or maybe I’m still that little girl, trying to get it right and not hide behind her mom.}
I’ll share more about Faith Streams/Traditions in my next post next week. I went out of town and left my resource home, and I wanted to break up the posts into small pieces anyway.
Talk to me. Is this new or old information, and how does it sit with you?
This post is part of a series called SF Deep Dive:
Outline here: A map for the upcoming journey
SF Deep Dive 1: Narratives
Getting from point A to B to C and D...yes, all of that resonated. As so many of your words do here. Thank you. 🙏🏾❤️
The scriptural basis for my thought is 1 John 2:20 & 27. The reason you can’t sometimes explain what you accurately “know” is because you are taught by Holy Spirit based on the anointing over your life. As an intercessor I need to “know” things in the moment when I’m praying over patients in the hospital. Holy Spirit teaches me all kinds of things on the spot I have to go look up in the Bible later or share with my bosses. Since I understand how the anointing works and I try to partner with it, I don’t question the information or myself. And praise God, it has always been found in the Bible when I have gone looking. I HAVE read it after all. Probably many times over in fact. But nobody has it all memorized. And then there are the nuances of extra information connected to my calling as an intercessor that I just “know” as well. I can’t sometimes find chapter and verse but I can usually find Biblical examples even if I don’t have language or “how to” for hardline Biblical exegetical understanding of what I know. BTW Holy Spirit gave me that phrase, I had to look it up. LOL Example. As an intercessor who prays over people at a hospital I have to spend volumes of time reading my Bible and also praying in tongues to tap into what I call “prophetic flow”. Beyond interceding for someone’s body to be healed, they need encouragement from the Lord sometimes or a direction for His purposes in their lives. I can find verses that TALK about tongues all over the Bible. But the various denominations that say it’s strictly limited to known languages based on their own interpretation will see the same exact verses differently than I and also the literal thousands of people I go to conferences with around the world who also pray in tongues. I don’t argue, I stay in my lane, I have European friends and they all know multiple languages, 1 more wouldn’t be any sign or wonder and certainly not a sign to Peter to go ahead and baptize the house of Cornelius. Why would the Lord bother to have this household break out in French if they knew German and in such a multicultural city as Caeserea and that even get noticed by Peter as a sign of Holy Spirit? When Europeans speak to me in English then turn to each other and speak in any number of languages it definitely doesn’t register as coming from God. What happened demonstrated to Peter Holy Spirit came down on them even as yet unbaptized. Had he known it would be so hotly debated today he probably would have been more clear. LOL I also know what tongues does for prophecy but that INCLUDES specifically how I should pray for someone’s healing. Again muddy theological waters. Side note I went to a conference in Sweden and one of the sessions was literally intercession for the country in tongues. A person (it was organized) would go to the podium. Introduce their topic (schools, churches, government, people, etc) in Swedish (somebody next to us interpreted the Swedish a few times), maybe read a scripture, stepped back from the mic, and the entire congregation prayed in tongues until they stepped back to the mic to close and step off the platform so the next person could introduce their topic and scripture. It was wildly refreshing to me as an intercessor. Outside of that session we usually had interpreters. Intercession tongues does not require interpretation, tongues in church does but I’ve only seen that once in my life. And it was interpreted. Long answer short? What is your God given calling? The anointing over your life will teach you everything you need to know to blow it out of the water with God if you stay heavily in the Word. Adding a tongues-prayer-life-chaser will take it next level. And you will not always be able to explain it because God quickened the knowledge you need directly to your spirit. You just KNOW. And that’s the best. And so super cool when you hear someone teach from the pulpit what God simply downloaded to you with Biblical references and it locks into a new place. Taking an online Danish Bible school and it’s just been mind blowing.