A Glimpse of Mortal Frailty

Let me clarify something: A prophetic gift doesn’t exclude you from getting stuff wrong.

It does make you very careful. This is not a cry for help. I’m explaining what it’s like for me. Different prophets in the Old Testament experienced their gifts and calling in different ways. Samuel started an academy to teach prophets how to use their gift. It’s not automatic for everyone, and it’s not for me.

I’m still learning how to make my brain interpret things coming from my heart. I’ve noted in the past that I have plenty to learn and unlearn. Sometimes I get a strong impression about something and it turns out that, while I did get the message, my mind bungled the meaning. Often enough, I have doubts about something and don’t publish it until I’m more sure what to make of it. There are some things I’m still not sure about, now even more than a year later, so it would do no good to tell you.

It’s not that I am so hot to protect my reputation. I’ll tell you straight up that I’m not right in the head. There’s something about my sense of calling and mission that makes me doubt my sanity quite often. I’ve warned my readers often enough that you all bear some risk in taking my word for anything.

I suppose things have turned out well enough so far, because my reading audience is still quite large. Still, I’ll never stop offering the caveat that what I write is merely me talking to myself, and you get to read over my shoulder. If some of what I write seems to answer questions or help you draw nearer to the Lord, by all means, use what you can. Feel free to reject anything you can’t use. Don’t worry about my feelings. I still carry a lot of self-doubt in the flesh, so that I don’t take myself too seriously.

So I’ll tell you this week I’m struggling with an impression that makes no sense to me at all. It persists through prayer and periods when I put in on the back burner. I’ll tell you this much: I sense a great upheaval coming very soon. I give it the rest of this week. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, that this is just a delusion of the flesh getting in the way of a genuine spiritual gift. I’d rather be wrong about this, because if it’s real, then we are in for a very rough time in ways I had never anticipated. Not something worse, just an unexpected turn in the path.

This has a lot to do with my warnings that we should expect plenty of surprises. I’m sure that if God were to tell us everything, we’d get in the way trying to change the outcomes. Some things we are far better off not knowing. The most important thing is that you not take yourself and your expectations too seriously, either. That way you won’t have to struggle with feeling betrayed. False expectations are always the fault of the flesh, and we have all suffered a significant level of deception and manipulation on a lot of things.

More than one OT prophet tried to keep his mouth shut. It’s not just the audience’s resistance to the message, but the torment you go through trying to make sense of things so you’ll know what to say. And these guys were far better equipped than I am. So maybe it makes a little sense why they were so often cryptic.

I think one important task I have is to make them seem more human.