Chicago Summer Intern: Weeks 5&6
22nd July 2010
So Sunday afternoon Ro Ro, no other than Rebecca Lewis, former War College alumni from Vancouver, takes me for a drive downtown Chicago. Its 5 weeks since I’ve been here and I finally get a taste of the city. Its great, set by the largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Michigan, it has ‘seaside’ as it were and a lovely promenade. Kind of a low lying Sydney crossed with the south coast of England thing going on.
Anyway, its a lake and a very nice one, nice colour and I realise how much I miss the sea. I’m a coastal girl at heart and I am stuck in the mid-west of America with no water in sight, so this evening was more than wonderful.
We walked through the city park and checked out DL Moody Bible college/church, there’s so much stuff going on in Chicago bible school-wise and ended the evening with dinner at Old Jerusalem in the Old Town. Tonight I have tickets to see the White Sox baseball which will be an event in itself.
With Josh and Jen going off to Teen Camp this week you’d think things would slow down….not so. I’ve had an awesome week on my own, God is showing up in everything. Its a simple case of not looking to the right or left but hearing that voice behind you which says this is the way, walk in it!
Right now I’m preparing for our first Prayer Ministry Team training morning. We have a handful of people attending and I’m in the process of putting the programme together. We also have Glory 2 God International Ministeries, two women with 20+years of intercession experience ready to lead us into an evening of practical intercessory training.
So I have been ‘discipling’ a lady for a few weeks, a believer in her early 50′s. Her eldest son was shot dead aged 28 not so long ago and I have been discipling a prayer and devotion time back into her life after a period of deep grief. As I prayed us in I asked that the Lord would ensure that my words were His words and boy, did i get that. I’ve never before had an experience like this in prayer. The Lord gave me a vision of a dark tree, the long stump part only and immediately I got the word oaks of righteousness and it went from there. I must have witnessed every tangible fruit of the spirit going in Corinth…. I sat in complete awe of this lady’s courage and conviction in God, I wondered how I could possibly assist her, but God showed up powerfully, filling me up so that I could hardly move, the spirit of God was on me so that my focus was razor sharp, my ears tuned to a pin drop as the images and scriptures God gave me transversed the bible from one end to the other in complete symphony to her cause. Wow. It was like one of those DTES experiences where God shows up to teach you something in someone more broken than you. All I saw was joy, pure joy.
The joy of the Lord, which is in us, despite our broken-ness, that is what we celebrate. We are to rejoice in the Lord’s joy despite our circumstances, our family our problems. It is the joy of the Lord that sets us free from captivity to grief, loss, sin and everything else…joy wears a lifted face, an excited movement, a deep contentment that cannot be contained.
So for this week – rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, rejoice!
Blessings from Chicago,
Sylvia
