So I normally had maybe one dream every few weeks, maybe once a month or less, but I almost never heard God speak to me personally, especially when I was awake. So this was an area of my walk with the Lord that no one could interfere with or silence me. Having dreams didn’t depend on my confidence or acceptance by the leaders or speaking up in a public setting or anything! Later when I was able to talk to God directly I had much fewer dreams, I think just because he could tell me what he wanted to tell me more directly.
And while I was increasingly glad to be out of the world, I still felt very guilty for my past sins and felt it would be best for me to remain single for the rest of my life and just serve the Lord that way as a celibate single man. Within two or three days of saying this to myself the Lord gave me a prophecy from my friend Bill, who at that time was actually renting a small apartment next door that was also owned by Patrick. And the word was as plain as could be: it was not God’s plan that I remain single, He in fact already had a special woman prepared for me to marry he said.
It was just so funny. It was Wednesday and we were having home group. Patrick’s house was on a large pond, and Bill’s apartment was just across the small beach next door. I was just then telling someone before the service started that I had decided not to get married and at that very moment Bill was walking across the beach and suddenly God spoke to him—BAM! And it was even in a poem that rhymed and everything. That was very personal to me! This is the prophetic poem.
A Special Woman for You
You can hear her name in the Breeze
as the Holy Spirit whispers “I know You.”
You can see her face amongst a million Flowers—
She’s as bright as the sun and as pure as the light,
don’t try and figure it out because its not your fight.
I must take you to the Valley of Loneliness,
for the season of the Flowers is still away.
You’re still a child in a Man’s world—
slow down, don’t run, I want to teach you to have fun.
There’s plenty of time for building
and plenty of time for work,
but to be a Masterpiece of a sculpture
you must be putty and a pliable piece of clay—
For I am the potter and you are the clay,
I have plans for you to prosper and not harm you.
Let go and let me work on you,
just believe, receive and rest with assurance
that I know her too!
—God.
Then Bill drew a triangle and wrote ‘God’ at the top and ‘man’ and ‘woman’ at the two corners at the bottom and said God showed him a relationship works best when man and woman and God are all in a relationship together. This is how God designed us and this is the best way for a marriage relationships to work. That was August 1990.
I memorized that poem simply from reading it so many times! And I didn’t know who the prophecy spoke of but there were only four girls my age in our entire church, two of them were the pastor’s daughters. We did not fellowship with any other churches, none of them were walking in the real gifts, so if I wanted to get married, it was probably going to be one of the pastor’s two younger daughters. Although there was serious talk that Ivy, one of the ‘flower sisters’ was still single, and almost 40, and well, it’s the End Times, and you never know! I should seriously consider it—but no, I never did consider it.
But since I still felt very guilty for my past sins, I assumed it would have to be the pastor’s second daughter who was my age but who I didn’t really like. Oh, she was tall and very beautiful, but to me was just not my type. More rough and a little bossy so I figured she was the best choice to sort of ‘punish me’ in a way. I’m sorry to say it like that, it probably sounds terrible—she’s really a lovely woman but just not my type.
Their other daughter was so sweet and pure, younger than me by two or three years, and was more open in her heart to the Lord, and we had a real connection but I knew it was too special for me since I had such a strong sense of my guilt so I rejected the very idea of her and I ever being a couple. This contradiction tormented me a long time as the elder girl got a serious boyfriend, then got engaged to be married … I then had a dream about a trapeze …
Trapeze Dream
So at this time we as a church started briefly having training classes on Wednesdays to teach people about the Five-fold Ministry and prophecy to try to develop people to be better teachers and prophets.
In this dream we were all standing in line being trained to use a trapeze, which clearly represented prophesying. I saw the boyfriend of the older daughter of the pastor in line with her, and many other young people I didn’t know. The person trying the trapeze first was a large woman, quite overweight and who was trying to swing but just couldn’t even get off the ground. In the dream she had once been able to swing up very high, right up to the ceiling but no longer could. In real life this lady had actually begun to prophesy a little during meetings previously but was no longer active doing that, so I knew this vision was a parallel of real life.
In the dream the pastor and his wife disagreed on what to do about her, and my reaction in the dream was very carefully NOT TO JUDGE them for their attitudes. He said move her out of the way so others can try. His wife said, No, she can do this, let her keep trying. Soon she moved aside herself and others got their chance to practice.
The dream had two more scenes, one that dealt with the pastor’s younger daughter and I, and the other dealing with my life falling into complete chaos. I knew better than to share the section about their daughter with them, so I left it out when I shared the dream in their council asking for advice and insight on the dream. I did share the next part, which was this:
I was hesitant to try the trapeze and wanted to watch a little longer before I took my turn. I backed away and leaned up against the wall to observe but as I did, I didn’t know it, but the wall was actually a folded-up gymnastic mat on wheels!! And when I leaned against it, it rolled away and so I grabbed for it to try to put it back in place but when I did I bumped it and it hit another mat instead, and then another, and another, and they all started to scatter like billiard balls in every direction. In the chaos I lost sight of the trapeze and all the people in the church and was in a panic and then I heard a voice, ‘The pastor can fix this.’ End of Dream.
I wrote that out and gave it to the prophets to ask them if it was from the Lord and they agreed unanimously that it clearly was. That helped me digest the scene I didn’t share with them which was about the pastor’s younger daughter and myself.
In this scene that I kept private I was watching the people in line and I saw the older daughter and her fiancée and that was OK with me, and then I saw the younger daughter and yes, I was having real feelings for her, only now in this dream she looked so immature, more immature than she was in real life. I obviously had feelings about her but was confused and being tormented by it. My attention was however drawn to her ‘girlish’ figure and it was not that of a ‘mature woman’ if I can say it like that. In the dream I got frustrated and decided I would not wait for her to grow up! So in frustration and anger I started looking around for a new woman to court, but as I did my gaze went right to her prophetic aunt, Elizabeth, and in the vision, wow, she had a full woman’s figure, quite ‘healthy’ as we used to say. I was embarrassed to see Elizabeth this way and in the dream I then felt such a strong conviction that it was wrong to look away from the young girl in anger and impatience, and if I did I would be very quickly tempted to sin and yes, I felt so ashamed. I needed to be true to my feelings and wait, be patient, have faith.
Now at the time I didn’t realize maybe God was saying there was a parallel between the young girl and the older aunt concerning their spiritual callings or ministries. What I would now say is that God was saying she may be ‘immature’ now but later she will be more ‘mature’ and yes become like a mature prophet like her aunt; again, just be patient. Back then I focused on her ‘physical’ maturing but the dream meant both.
In real life I was already dealing with this confusion very strongly and I knew the pastor’s wife did not approve of me and often said things like that. I knew she did not want me as a son-in-law, after all I got saved from the world and was not a virgin, and her daughter was, so I was not worthy of her. Period. In the dream I knew I should not get frustrated, I should not give up waiting for her, not look around for someone else, but also that I should not judge the pastor or his wife for their attitudes and that even if things went crazy out of control that ‘the pastor could fix it.’
Unfortunately when it played out in my real life I was unable to do any of these wise things.
I didn’t really understand the dream was giving me wisdom I needed to choose to obey. I generally thought prophecy was telling me what was going to unfold regardless of how I acted, prepared or prayed. That’s the worst thing I understood about prophesy at that immature time, that it was going to happen no matter what. It’s not true in many cases. A prediction from God might be insight of an unchangeable future event, yes, but it also may be a warning of what MIGHT happen if such and such isn’t stopped, usually what will happen IF PEOPLE DON’T PRAY or repent or take proactive steps, or whatever. So if you pray and repent the foretold consequence won’t happen! Even promises of God are likewise always conditioned upon people being faithful, walking right with the Lord and having faith. Our lives with the Lord are not governed by Fate. We’re not living out a Greek Tragedy!
Unfortunately I was merely a passive observer in all this and didn’t use the information in the dream to help me consciously avoid trouble at all. I didn’t know I could or was supposed to do that. I didn’t understand how to stand in faith against adverse circumstances either. When things went wrong I just fell apart and then ran away.
Barns on a Hillside
And as things got more difficult for me with the pastor’s daughter and her mom, I had another dream.
In real life I had just gotten my first computer, a used Apple, and it had what we now all recognize as a detached computer keyboard. Before this many computers had a keyboard that was built into the computer screen console. So a detached keyboard was still a very novel thing. In this dream I had a keyboard, just the keyboard, and I was typing on it as I sat on a hillside overlooking my future. Every key I pressed created something but it was only a barn, or a farm house, or a grain silo down in the valley I was overlooking. It was my future but I was unable to create anything more modern than old farmers’ barns … and in the dream I knew it was because I lacked a mate. Having a wife with me would for some reason enable me to create a modern future for myself.
In the dream I then turned around and there was the pastor’s younger daughter, by now about 17 and even more beautiful than her eldest sister (who by the way won Misses America (but not Miss America!) a few years back I was told). In the dream I moved towards her to embrace her, but she turned away—and then I got upset and I turned away—but it was just as she turned towards me to embrace me! This back-and-forth went on a few times while her mom was running in between us to interfere with our relationship.
After doing this a few times I got really upset in the dream and decided to forget the whole thing and just leave! So I left and then all went black.
After a time I softened my heart and decided to go back and then I saw her but I didn’t recognize her! She was so sick she was just a skeleton covered with skin and ants were crawling all over her. I picked up her limp body in my arms and was unable to say anything to try to explain the miscommunication and troubles we were having and all I could say in the dream was, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ the way you would comfort a grieving friend or child.
The scene then abruptly changed to a third relationship scene. I saw two people standing face to face and between them, between me and this lady, there was a patch of ground that represented the ‘depth’ of the relationship and to dig down was to deepen the relationship—but the ground had already been dug out very deeply and expertly in a geometric shape like a tapering funnel, a very artistic and refined shape, and it had been filled back in but only with loose sand and so it was very easy to dig down as deep and as fast as you wanted to without exerting any real effort at all! It was some kind of divine provision for an intimacy between these two people! Wow! Really a special, chosen mate—for both of us.
Zeal without Wisdom is Not Good
In real life I left their church fellowship after being with them about three years. I was heartbroken, rejected and confused, but I always felt somehow things would work out with the pastor’s daughter—I saw a vision and I was anyway totally fixated on that outcome—like I built my entire world around that one belief, but unfortunately I didn’t know how to act in accordance with that outcome or ‘stand on his word’ when things began to go astray. The dream was clear and I trusted God to tell me the truth, but I didn’t know I had a responsibility to stand in faith, to trust God, to be an active part of the spiritual process either.
I really had no wisdom and no faith.
I didn’t understand yet how to pray according to a prophecy, how Paul said to wage warfare according to prophetic direction that went before me, or even how to pray to God to ask Him to act on his word contrary to the facts and circumstances I saw around me.
If God said it would happen why even pray about it? I thought it was all like in Greek dramas or secular TV shows—impersonal fate.
God already gave a word and all I was supposed to do was sit by and watch it happen I thought. That seems almost right—but it doesn’t work. God is looking at the heart, and it is in the heart that we believe. Embracing doubt and rejection of God’s plans because it seems too impossible is not faith. We naturally look for things to change or positive circumstances as the evidence, but no, our Faith is the evidence, not the circumstances. That’s a spiritual truth that carnal people just don’t get!—I didn’t get it at that time. I wonder sometimes if I get it even now?
Faith is rest, yes, but it is impossible to stand in faith without exerting a lot of effort to deny the flesh and lay hold of that rest. Maybe not effort of doing things, sending flowers, or writing love poems, but the effort that is required is putting your foot down in prayer with God to command the outside circumstances to obey God’s word, and your INTERNAL thoughts and feelings to obey as well: cast away all fear and worry and doubt and unbelief, and actively cast your cares upon Him because he cares for us! This is what triggers a promise of God to manifest. God is in fact in control and will turn all things around to make things conform to his already spoken Will—if you will but remain faithful and steadfast.
Prophecy tells us His Will, but we need to be the one who will stand in the faith on it to see it come to pass. It is Destiny but it is not Fate.
Wow, I could have done so many things differently but like I said when things went wrong I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t seek His Heart to comfort my confusion, seek His Wisdom for what to do in the chaos, stand on his word against the adverse circumstances or ‘have patience with the right attitude’ as He later said is what our faith looks like … no, I fell apart, closed down and literally ran away.
Another time God warned me about getting upset about this. It was a prophetic canoe ride. But I can’t share every word. It’s so quick and easy to leave sometimes but it can also be just so hard to return back again!
Also I should have been more open to other options and outcomes than the one I had been fixated on. The Lord even asked me one time if I wanted to marry a different girl, my friend Dan’s very sweet (and very attractive) younger sister, who was the same age as the pastor’s daughter I was in love with. But I thought it was a trick question! He showed me her in the Spirit and she was beautiful, humble, talented, pure hearted … I had no idea why God was showing me this. Then He asked me openly if I wanted to marry her instead! I knew it was the Spirit of God but I 100% assumed He only meant for me to marry the pastor’s daughter. Other people had even came up to me to tell me this as confirmation—why was God giving me options?—was he just testing me?
So I rejected that offer flatly without considering it. Today seeing that kind of vision would have stopped me in my tracks! God was not tricking me. He saw how things were headed already. He even told me, but I didn’t understand the vision. I was fixated on one outcome but also didn’t know how to pray in faith—the closest thing I had was stubbornness I suppose. It’s not the same thing.
And I also assume Sarah, her mother, was praying overtime to get rid of me. How does that work? Can two people pray for opposing things and God will take sides? I don’t presume to know what God will do, but I know there is power in a praying mother, and not so much power in a not-praying, angry, confused young boy! In the vision me and the pastor’s daughter were trying to work things out, we almost connected, but Sarah was running between us trying to break things up. She succeeded.
Anyway, to skip ahead, a few years passed and yes, I decided to marry someone else, a lady from South India, and I moved to Hong Kong. I had no idea what to make of those dreams now. I was just confused. What I did know was that I had to endure years and years of such a difficult relationship—was I now being punished? I felt I surely deserved it! After many more years, even after being in the prophetic ministry together, my wife left me, left the church, left God’s calling and his own promises given to her—she left everything. By that time I was frankly relieved because there was so much trouble in our relationship by then, the peace of solitude was so welcome but instead of the Lord slowing down my training at that time to let me grieve, he accelerated it!
That was the time I began to have hour-long one-on-one conversations with the Lord and when He re-trained me in the prophetic ministry and when I learned the most about the Lord, my calling, the Kingdom and his plans for me in the future. Which I’ll get to in a few pages, don’t worry!
Then a few years later still he sent me on a real long-term mission to the Philippines, and while on that mission a few years after my wife left me I had a new friendship—completely platonic—but with a woman that was just so very special. There are people who grow up as friends with God and who walk with God in a special way for years privately. She was someone like that. More intimate with God even as a teenager, which was when she started doing missionary work, than many adult Christians will ever be this side of Glory. But then God said I could marry her and that she was the Special Women he promised me years ago—she was the Promise of the Dawn which I thought had failed—and I just about fell over! This was about 25 years after I had this dream of the Barns on the Hillside as I called it, and only then did I finally understand that I was not seeing three stages of a relationship with one woman—my pastor’s daughter—but three different relationships with three different women!
But yes, I’ll get to all that a little bit later on.
God’s Word will Endure
I also realized another stunning truth—God promised me a Special Woman, that he had prepared her and also that he would be able to knit us together in uncommon intimacy, and that God’s Word is more trustworthy than any circumstance in the physical reality. This is where people get confused—I KNOW I had the option to make it work with the pastor’s daughter, but if that failed, if she refused, if she died young, if her mother destroyed the relationship, if I walked away in frustration and confusion—NONE OF THAT WOULD MATTER … GOD HAD SPOKEN and MADE A PROMISE to ME! He had a ‘Special Woman’ for Me. If they took it away, guess what? God knew that before time began and already had a solution prepared to remedy it to bring his word to pass. Guess what? God does not FIND a way so his Word will come to pass, He MAKES a way for his word to come to pass. Guess what? God’s Word has in it, itself, the Power to Make itself come to pass. Everyone may fail, the world itself may pass away but Gods Word will remain. It makes no sense to you when you are walking out a crisis, but it’s still 100% true. Trust God not your own understanding, your circumstances, not even the people around you. Love the people, but don’t rely on the people!
But we are fixated on that girl, on that car, or the house, or the calendar date, or the amount in cash—on all the visible earthly circumstances—but this is carnal thinking, based in the Flesh, deceptive thinking! What God is trying to teach us—but like weaning a child away from nursing—is that His INVISIBLE Word is Reliable above and beyond ANY physical reality you can come up with. His Word is Living and Active, Eternal, but spiritual and carnal Man cannot comprehend it. So if he said it, he will do it! How many times has he reminded me of this!? We however are too attached to, and only believe in what we can see, feel and touch … but it is what we CANNOT see that is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:17-18—17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, 18 while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
“For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” This means so much!
But what if the girl said no, her mom doesn’t like me, she says I smell like elderberry wine—that does not matter. This is not a Greek Tragedy; this is the Kingdom of God! Change how you see things!
If he says you are going to have a baby and your wife goes through menopause, not recently but 40 years ago, IT DOES NOT MATTER because God has promised. Stand on his Promise—Be faithful to his Word! Every man may be a liar but God is not a man that he would lie.
Psalm 27:13-14. —13 I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 14 Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the Lord!
Proverbs 29:18—Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law [the Torah/teaching/instructions of God]. (ESV)
We prophesy in part, and we know in part. Let’s try not to forget it!
So it’s not the part of the prophecy you understand that gets you into trouble of course, it’s the part that you don’t, or worse the part you THINK you understand but actually you MIS-understand. We STILL have to walk in faith and humility. Trust God, he knows what he’s doing. “Wait on the Lord; be of good courage.” Or as the Lord said to us, “Standing in faith is this: patience with the right attitude.” Amen!
Wow, when God asked me to write this book on how I learned about prophecy I thought it would be fun, easy and quick—I didn’t realize I’d have to relive my worst failures and troubles, over and over again. I’m far too private to share these things normally, but I will be honest—if I can help anyone to understand more about how prophecy works, how we misunderstand it and may be confused by it—if I can help anyone avoid the pain and mistakes I went through, it’s worth raking myself over the burning coals a few times. I wrote a poem around that time called Trust the Fire, because no one needs to be taught to trust the Feather Pillows!
Everything Linked into ONE BIG PICTURE
Also, Elizabeth had two other visions for me. One was personal but the second was life-altering. Elizabeth said she saw that God would begin to teach me himself and give me different revelations that would seem all like separate ideas, like building blocks, but seemingly not connected to each other—BUT ONE DAY, she said, ONE DAY God would give me a single revelation, an idea so Big and Profound that it would LINK ALL THE OTHER IDEAS GOD GAVE ME into ONE BIG PICTURE. What once looked like separate issues I would then see how they connect together.
I wasn’t told to go looking for it, how could I? And I now understand those ‘building blocks’ were absolutely needed to lay a foundation of understanding to place that Big Idea upon. No, I could not just go looking for that—it instead had to go looking for me!
When it came it completely revolutionized how I understand the purpose of ministry and being a Christian. It changed everything! I’m talking about the conversation I had with Jesus on Isaiah 61. More on that in a later chapter, Chapter 20, but if you skip ahead it may be too much to take in all at once. People like to drink from a water fountain but who can drink from a Fire-hose?
