Glory and Grace 2009...Here Goes

Wow, a little nervous to be my honest self, seems like I'm too radical for even some of my grace friends! I feel over the past few days the enemy is coming at me from many different angles, and unexpected ones, to make me feel very alone and even tempting me to be apologetic for my passion for the gospel. This is not to say that there aren't some faults on my part for how I can often come barreling into people with too much at the wrong time and knock them over before they know what hits them! I don't ever want to lose the passion, intensity, and boldness that I believe God loves about me, but I would like my love and compassion to become more obvious to people, if you know what I mean. Some days we have to be content knowing God loves us whether other people do or not.

K, so none of that has to do with Hong Kong really. I don't know where to start. The trip was long, I think I already mentioned that. So, the first thing of note I guess was that I got to visit with Ryan and Kylie for an afternoon before the conference started, and it was so exciting to see the stacks of Ryan's freshly printed books! This is one new ministry that has me really excited, Ryan's vision to start making more grace resources available by publishing and distributing books and worship music. AMEN!!!!!Thank-you Jesus!!!!

The next thing of note is that when I went to meet Lydia at the airport we somehow missed each other so after a few hours I finally went back to my room and there she was! I was so proud of her for finding her own way, believe me, she must have had guardian angels. Having Lydia bunking with me was definately a major highlight of the trip, we've never gotten to spend so much time together, uninterrupted especially! And the girl is oozing the joy of glorious grace, and FREEDOM! We had some amazing fellowship, though I think we stayed up too late most nights. Also if you want to see pictures, head over to her blog, she's got quite a few up or to City Church's facebook group page, hundreds more there.

The conference started the next morning on Wednesday, and opened with Rob furiously preaching the gospel (after a couple of worship songs and an opening of the conference by a Chinese family from City Church). It was classic Rob grace preaching, doesn't get any better than that! The second session was Rob continuing in the same vein to lay the foundation for the conference. We had the afternoon off and mainly we rested and ate. Unfortunately we really didn't do any sight seeing except for an afternoon down at the waterfront with a ferry ride. Poor Lydia! But she claims she didn't mind...

The evening session was Joshua Mills I believe. He was sharing some testimonies and stopping every so often to pray for certain people in the crowd, Fini and Isi were among the first, he actually came out with their full street address though he didn't know them! He healed some, and came walking through the hall showing us the oil that was coming on his hands. A lady in front of us got some off his hands and let us smell it, it had a strange smell (some said like vanilla, others said other things) I think that was also the same night we were smelling other good smells all night.

Josh is very pleasant and joyful and I really like seeing people get healed and hearing testimonies so I found it all enjoyable. I personally didn't find he showed much of an understanding of the difference between Old Covenant Glory and New, though he began to talk about it a little more later on. He seemed to know the Old Testament very well but rarely if ever used New Testament. I was very glad that he was able to hear Rob preach the gospel and hope that God will use the experience to strengthen the foundations of his ministry even more, and that even more signs and wonders and miracles and salvations will come as he begins to see Jesus more and more as the glory cloud we now live in!

Some people were not bothered by any of this at all, but I found myself leaving not feeling satisfied, as I've begun to notice is what always has happened to me in the past when my focus is on experiencing some amazing thing. I found that being at the conference dredged up some old stuff that I've always had issues with in charismatic settings. Rob had talked a bit in the beginning something about not hindering what God wants to do, something in regards to manifestations or being self-conscious, I don't really remember exactly. This really really distracted me, probably in large part due to my history of interactions with charismatic ministy times in the past, having been criticized and judged for not falling or acting weird enough. I guess the assumption is that if nothing weird appears to be happening to your body then you are not free and must be resisting the Holy Spirit's work in your life. This has always left me feeling confused, self-conscious, and condemned. I want to state clearly that I KNOW this was not Rob's intention, and it is clear how much he loves people and just wants them to be free. Nevertheless, I ended up in the bathroom stall crying my eyes out to God during worship of the first session on Thursday morning.

Ahhh, God is good. Of course he spoke to me and loved me and comforted me. He is so happy with where we are in our relationship right now, and this may sound weird but he said he is not a rapist. He will never push me to expressions of love which are beyond where we are in our relationship, he will never treat me like a prostitute. He showed me that my intimacy with my husband has grown and evolved the longer we are together and the more we trust one another, but if it had been forced on me it would not have been love. The main purpose of experiences with him is to bless me, not to impress anyone or please him. It pleases him to please me, and he KNOWS me, really KNOWS me and knows exactly what I need, want, and enjoy. I don't know if I'm explaining this right, but after this I was much better and able to be much less distracted and worried about what people were thinking of me. After all, I just wanted to be able to freely enjoy God and his presence!

So the sessions, the order ect..I'm fuzzy on a bit. I'm sure there will be much more detailed accounts (and possibly at least some recordings) coming soon from others anyway. I know Fini spoke on ministering out of rest, out of God's presence and how church is just meaningless when God's presence isn't there. So true! His main text was come to me all you who are weary and heavy burdened and I will give you rest, take my yoke upon you for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. One of my favorite verses of all time! Fini seems very laid back and pretty happy, two qualities I always appreciate, of course he's still passionate in worship, I particulary remember one point where he started kicking up his legs dancing, it was quite funny!

Thursday night was probably my favorite night. Annaline (I think that's right) led worship doing lots of great songs with amazing words and then Rob preached and led ministry time, part of which involved getting those who knew they were lightening conductors that night to come forward and get extra-charged then go back into the crowd. We all held hands and Ursula, of course a lightening conductor, ended up miraculously right next to us though she had been way up in front originally. She didn't even know at first because she didn't have her glasses on. Anyway, Lydia and I were laughing hysterically, I was crying I was laughing so hard and Lydia was in a heap on the floor half the time. She kept trying to get up though, she was a little nervous of getting hurt down there, probably with good reason haha! Anyway, it was just fun and a delicious manifest presence of God with us.

Then Rob called down pastors/leaders and wives, at which point Ursula told me to go down so I did. The City Church ministry team was wonderful, so gentle and loving and of course powerful in ministry. The atmosphere became so quiet, peaceful and full of God love and Rob became this totally gentle father to us. I'm still blown away by him, and how much we love him without having to idolize him. Don't know if that makes sense, it's just that since coming into grace I love how I can love and respect and honor people without putting them on a pedestal or having to agree with them 100%. I think it's so freeing. We can let people be people and love them and realize we're all different and that's good for us!

Also, backing up a bit, Thursday afternoon we got to spend with some of the people from Grace Revolution, which was another major highlight. Ryan came with us, and we got to meet Wayne Duncan, Tony Yu, and many others. Meeting Wayno was not dissappointing! He and Ryan were mocking our supposed accents a bit though, talk about pots calling kettles black! They can't even distinguish between 'pill' 'pole' 'pull' etc...all just sounds the same, we had the same issue with Bertie, but in grace we overlook such things.

I guess I'll continue this in another post since it seems to be getting long! There will probably actually be two more posts, one to finish telling about the conference and time we got to spend with Urs, and another to sum up what I took away from the whole thing.

Hong Kong Trip Part 2...

Here's what I posted over at the Rob Rufus Blog:

Well, I think I left off on the afternoon of Sunday...before the evening meeting with Joshua Mills...
Sunday night started out with woship, being led by Bonnie Rufus and a whole bunch of other worshippers from CCI. We sang many simple songs about the glory of God, including "The Glory Realm" by Ruth Heflin. It was very very good. I know, that's not very descriptive! The worship time was both powerful and intimate, and the presence of God was obvious. Now my memory is getting fuzzy, uh-oh!

I believe Joshua got up and took over at the piano once we were really getting lost in worship, he was singing songs (I think probably both songs he's written as well as prophetic/spontaneous songs) but at that point I was not completely aware of anyone else. I was deeply engaged with Jesus, having many heavenly imaginations run through my mind, I say heavenly because they seemed to be of me in heaven with Jesus. Sometimes words that Josh was singing would kind of float in and influence the direction of my thoughts. It was probably one of the more intimate experiences with God I've had in a corporate setting.

He also called out several words about people being healed of specific things, a couple of them we heard testimony of later that week at the prayer meeting. Then he spent some time teaching us about the glory realm. This was not preaching, but more a gentle but authoritative sharing of truth,wisdom, and God's word by the Spirit. More than anything, I would say it was extremely faith building, something of an impartation. He shared several amazing personal testimonies as well, including some of teleporting, but I'm not going to re-tell them here, you should listen yourself-- you won't be bored! He also took an offering of sorts and really blessed the church with the money, refusing to allow CCI to give any of it to him.

We then went home with Ryan and Kylie and stayed up too late talking again! We spent the morning hanging out with their family (somewhere along the line Aaron got his first taste of Veggiemite, which he wasn't exactly impressed with). I don't think there's any way to adequately describe how much we enjoyed getting to know Ryan and Kylie and their girls. Then Ryan dropped us off near a bank so we could exchange our money and wander around for a couple of hours. While in the bank, we saw Glenda and so we started chatting outside the bank. After a couple of minutes, Rob turned up and joined in.

We then started walking together to the point where we were going to part ways, and ended up standing in the street talking for probably 45 minutes. Finally, we left to look at a temple, and were taking pictures inside when Rob came in a couple of minutes later and asked if we'd like to eat lunch with him and Glenda. We graciously declined in favor of shopping-HAHAHA, I don't think so! We were of course thrilled and quite surprised! So we got to eat lunch with them, talking the ears off for another hour or two. This was definately one of the highlights of the whole trip for us, we got to share most of our testimony and thank them in person for making the message of grace available to so many people. And we talked about you too Dan! And shared some of Keith and Lydia's testimony as well, and probably some of you other people, you know who you are! All good things we said, don't worry.

All our friends want to know what Rob and Glenda are really like in person, so I guess I should give my impressions. I've given my impression of Glenda in the last post...so about Rob, he was less intense normally than when preaching hehe, which I think is for the best. They were very easy to talk with and very normal people, I think exactly what we would expect from listening to all the messages online. In other words, it would seem they are real people and don't bother faking it for church and ministry. I'm not sure of their impressions of us, but they seemed to like us well enough!

I don't think I mentioned this yet, but before we left, God kept telling me over and over 'they're going to love you' , meaning both me in particular and Aaron as well. That may sound strange, but in light of the fear of man problem I talked about, it was just God's kindness to me making sure I would thoroughly enjoy our time in Hong Kong and not be hindered from receiving all that God had for me there. Also, he kept showing me this glimpse of Rob laughing heartily at something I said, which I got to see in real life! I think I wrote on my own blog before leaving that I hoped they could handle me over there, it would seem that they can, and that makes me happy.

Anyway, Ryan had to hunt us down since we sort of forgot to meet him when we were supposed to...but he was very gracious about it.

Also, click HERE to see some pictures I put up on Facebook. Also, I'll put up a couple of video clips as soon as I can figure it out!

Next post, I'll continue with the evening meeting on Monday night with Joshua Mills and Kaye Beyer...