The other day, we were having morning prayer at the office, and God told me He doesn’t like “reruns.”

He wants to be found in new ways, so He’ll go and hide himself. A lot of us get downtrodden and a little lost at this point. We suddenly won’t be able to find Him where He was before, or the way He was found before, and we’ll either build a religion around what we have always done (i.e., we refuse to try something new), or we’ll search Him out. “Where are You? What are You doing now?”

Finding God usually happens in three basic ways:

1. In some cases, God will want us to continue doing what we were doing before, even if we don’t seem to be making any headway in it or find it incredibly dry. He’s asking us to discipline ourselves in that action.

2. Or we’ll discover Him in something we’ve not discovered Him in before. It’s good to put this into practice: If you met Him somewhere or while doing something once, try it again. He might have more there for you.

3. At other times, we’ll discover ways to meet with Him that don’t seem to ever dry up. For instance, I usually always find Him when I go for a walk. Sometimes even that will get dry, and I’ll start to journal and find Him there, or draw Scripture, etc., but eventually, He’ll want to go on walks again. There’s just something special about that for me.

We usually find Him at places where we feel peace. Like I mentioned, I’ll go on a walk and find Him. But sometimes, I won’t find His peace there at all, and then I’ll go to the mall and find it there. “Really?” I ask. “At a mall?” I never would have gone there, so that’s why He took me there!

Be prepared for Him to take great measures to keep your relationship alive.

 The Lord told Ezekiel to cook with animal dung, which was unclean to the Jewish religion. Hosea was told to marry a prostitute, which, for obvious reasons, was socially problematic. Peter was told in a vision to eat animals declared unclean in Hebrew law. 

God has a history of telling people to do things that seem offensive to our values and our culture as a prophetic sign, or as a vehicle for releasing new revelation and understanding.

I asked the Lord the other day how he wanted to spend time together with me. He told me that He wanted to spend time with me painting my toenails. This caused me to do an internal double take. God, is that you? Did you say that? But the thought persisted and He wasn’t saying anything else. So under the pretense of buying nail polish for my wife, I went to the supermarket and bought nail polish. I was thinking I’d get blue or green or some funky — but not girlie — color, but all they had was red or pink. So red it was.

After I put the red nail polish on, it looked just like blood to me. It was then that God told me that one day on the anniversary of the approval of ru486 in the U.S., there would be a law approving a suicide pill. Because we had blood on our hands with the abortion pill, there would be a walking in blood in our own lives. This is what the red toenails represent — walking through the blood we had released with our own hands. In particular, those who had a key role in pushing for ru486 would see a high percentage of suicides in their own family line. 

So here I am, me and my own version of a levitical Jew eating food cooked over unclean feces: I have red toenails. 

At least until I remove the polish.

When I was taking my morning walks with Jesus I started seeing names written on trees. God calls all the stars by name(Psalms 147:4) so having names for every tree is not a big leap.

The funny thing was that although each name was different they all started with zt. I did a Hebrew word study on the word tree and found that the Hebrew pronunciation for tree was otz.

I realized I been reading the names from left to right as in English instead of from right to left as in Hebrew.

Walking with Jesus is always an adventure.

I had an interesting experience once with a stranger offering me something in the Charlotte airport.

I have many interactions with angels, the frequency of these encounters varies, but it is not uncommon for me to go through a period when I am on a daily basis receiving messages and heavenly impartations from the angelic realm. During one of these times of heavy angelic interaction I was traveling through the Charlotte airport. While I was sitting in a chair waiting for my next flight I saw an angel standing behind to my right holding a vanilla envelope.

It told me that these were my orders for where I was traveling to, which was Asheville, NC. I was about to take the envelope when it occurred to me that I had better vet this angelic courier, so I asked it who Jesus was to it.

It stammered, looked away from me, seemed to say “Um…”, and then it left. I was a little bothered by the fact that I had almost received an assignment from a false angel. Then I felt the Holy Spirit tell me that this was a test, not so much to see if I would take the false assignment, but to show me that I had discernment.

I also know that this happened so I can help people practice discernment of spirits. If you are having an encounter and there is a check in your spirit do not hesitate to ask the Holy Spirit if what you are seeing (or sensing or feeling or guessing is there) is from Him and do not be afraid to ask any creature who Jesus is to it.

In the parable of the tortoise and the hare, the hare moves in fast bursts but is too inconsistent to win the race. The tortoise wins because of a slow steady progression in the right direction. In no other area is this a more fitting analogy then in your spiritual life. Slow daily growth in your relationship with Gods blows away extreme experiences.

If you equate an incredible mind blowing experience with God as having a spiritual change impact of 100 and spending time with God on a daily basis as having a change impact of 1 then over the course of a year the person who had one incredibly impacting experience has had a total change of 100 but the person who spent time with God daily had a totally change of 365.

Obviously, having both the daily encounters and the incredible encounter increases growth even more and the truth is that encountering God daily in small ways sets you up to have more incredible big experiences. But, the hidden danger of powerful times of growth is that it can allow you think that slow growth is no growth.

The reason the hare takes a nap after sprinting is that, after sprinting, walking seems just as slow as not moving at all. Yes he is exhausted because he was sprinting, but the seemingly pointlessness of walking makes taking a nap seem to have no cost.

The most important thing to do after having an incredibly big experience is to make sure you go right back to having small ones. If you saw an angel today search for the still quiet of voice of God tomorrow.