Off with the old

Last week was the monthly 'Daughters of Destiny' meeting at QP, and it was, as ever, awesome. I am pretty evangelical about this group and have got 3 of my pals from different churches coming along pretty regularly. DoD (as it is affectionately known) is for 18-35 year old women and is what I would term a charismatic-prophetic-Spirit-led discipleship group, although my experience of that kind of thing is pretty narrow. All the serious theologians will be loving that hypenated term! One of the main things that makes these meetings special is that there is particular emphasis on ministry - and no-one escapes - the leadership appear fully committed to making sure that everyone who attends is prayed with and ministered to - sitting passively is not an option. This also makes it a bit scary, as some of the women have amazing prophetic gifts and an uncanny ability to put their finger exactly on where you are in life at that particular moment. I'm talking hotline to God stuff. This is so encouraging and sometimes a bit uncomfortable if I am having an attitude problem.

Before Thursday however, I'd never seen manky old bras and pants being put on a cross before, but I have now! The speaker for the evening was Sandra King who works with Clive Corfield at Sovereign Ministries. She was speaking on Esther and how she prepared for meeting the King with baths and beauty treatments for 6 months. The focus was particulaly (well what I took from it) on bathing, and when we get into a bath, we don't seem to mind taking off our clothes, but quite often we take off our undies as fast as possible without looking at them and jump into the water; sometimes we can even forget to take them off and put a foot in the water before removing them. The spiritual parallel is that we have grubby layers under us that we can forget to take off when we come into God's presence, layers that we put on each day without thinking about and which we can keep putting on for years because no-one sees them but us. Sandra encouraged us to take off these grotty layers, layers of self-pity, grief, hurt etc. and lay them down at the cross - symbolised by her hanging her own grotty bras and pants on the cross. It was piercingly effectively and what followed was an outpouring of confession, repentence, pain, loss and hurt (which my colleague and I refer to as a snotfest) with bodies strewn on the floor, some overwhelmed by their pain, others by God's Spirit. Anyway, business was done with God and wholesale healing received. I've not hard-core cried at a DoD meeting for a while now, which I think is a good thing, but sometimes God can catch you unawares.
I love meetings that leave you with a deposit of their message that lasts all month, and that was one of them. Bring it on God.