Weakness into strength. [Andrew McMillan]

I flew to West Virginia to help move my mother to assisted living in Lewisburg, WV.  I felt like I was leaving a child in a boarding school.  We thought she had suffered another stroke but it was her kidney failing.  When she said we would probably never see each other again, I had to turn my head and then turned again to assure her we would always see each other, but I drove away having a hard time seeing the road- it was raining hard inside and out. A few days after I arrived back to Colombian, my sister called me to rush back to be with her in her last hours. On Monday night, August 27, 2014, I was alone with her in the room and praying with Kathy on the phone. As I hung up, I told her I was going to be with her all night. I turned to make up the sofa bed to spend the night close to her. I turned again to see her breathless. I turned to our Father God who gave her to us. For the last 25 years, she was praying I would move back into “this country” to be nearer to her. I never did, but now she is not disappointed.

That month of August had started with the hope of some down time in Florida, but, before leaving Colombia, I dreamed I was in a church in Medellin and ran into Rodney Howard Browne. He said, “Brother, I hear what God is doing here in Colombia,” and, in the dream, I said, “I have learned that when I present my weakness to God, He presents His power to me.”  Suddenly we both felt the Holy Spirit descending over us. Two nights later I dreamed again that I was trying to lower a heavy dug-out canoe into the water, but I saw that the water was inside a man-made cement tank. I decided it was not worth lowering the canoe into waters that were not flowing so I put it on top of my car and was driving out the town when I saw my son, Christian, standing in front of a beautiful home. He told me it was Rodney’s house and as soon as I was coming up the steps, Rodney and his wife welcomed me inside to dine. As soon as I entered, I saw through the big glass-doors the crystal blue waters of the inter-coastal.  Then I told Rodney in the dream about my previous dream but I enhanced a bit the words: “ I have learned that when we present our extreme weakness to God, He presents His extreme power to us.”  As in the first dream, the Spirit rolled over us like a fog.

In the dream, Rodney may represent a man who walks in the Spirit. The canoe was my ministry that I did not want to lower into a man-made religion. And my son certainly is a link to the coming move of the Spirit over the next generation.  But little did I know that August would be a month of weakness for my mother and for myself. She gave her last weak breath to God and God’s power took her into the world more real than her Canadian home.  I felt weak and helpless as a child because I was her child. For the first few moment of having no earthly parent, I gave the weakness to our Father God and He gave me the strength I did not know was there.  Now I am heading back to Colombia, weaker than ever and expecting the power of God to be like thunder in the bones like the sea pounding the pier wood.