Good Monday Everyone!

Last night, Emily and I went to a meeting with Reinhart Bonnke, the man who led 52 million people to the Lord in one decade! It was so amazing to have a man such as this to lay his hands on us and pray that we would receive an impartation! I took this picture and it blurred because I didn’t want to look like a groupie… or like I was defiling that holy experience! LOL I just had to capture that moment… thank God for my iphone!  

I woke up today feeling so much FAVOR riding over my life! It was like God was hovering over my bed with gigantic wings spread 40 feet in both directions… rock hard muscles were popped off his outstretched arms… and his face exuded a countenance of great FAVOR!

Just knowing that God is with us and for us… it’s all we need to JUMP FROM OUR BEDS with LIGHT BEAMING FROM OUR BEAUTIFUL FACES! 

Proverbs 16:15 “When the KING SMILES, there is life; his FAVOR refreshes like a spring rain.”

I remember a few years ago I went through a pretty long season of feeling like a big fat loser. No matter how aggressively I sought to encouraged myself, no matter how much I read my Bible, no matter long and passionately I prayed… I just kept feeling like such a low life… and I could not shake it!

One day as I was thinking about my lack of courage and how I just wanted to crawl up under a rock and die… God showed me something that BROKE THE DEJECTION in a SECOND!

I began to think about the events of the years preceding that difficult season… how that my MOM and my GRANDFATHER had both passed away! I thought about what they meant to me… and HOW MUCH OF MY LIFE WAS BLESSED BY THEIR SMILING FACES! They were both KINGS in the heart of this little guy, and WHEN I SAW THEM SMILING OVER ME I FELT INVINCIBLE!

Then they died… and all that FAVOR was gone… and even though I still had my wife and my God, and a bunch of good friends… I felt a huge vacuum in my heart! 

During this same time, there were a few people I had also considered KINGS in my life… and at that moment, they were holding very unfavorable opinions of me… it was so DRAINING! Every time I thought about moving into my future, I was ZAPPED down by the frowning countenances of my current cloud of witnesses.

Whether we realize it or not, EACH OF US has a cloud of witnesses… over time, we build our clouds with our biggest fans… they become our council in the sky… and as long as they are SMILING, we can take on ANYTHING life dishes out! 

I think that most clouds consist of 5-10 Kings… those 5-10 people that feed us AFFIRMATION no matter what. And if two of them DIE… and a few of them resign… we are left to face the scorching trials of life without a covering of support!

This is what I have learned since that day: When our clouds diminish… we still HAVE THE SMILING FACE OF GOD HOVERING OVER US! I have learned to look for him and maintain a fresh IMAGE OF HIS SMILING FACE IN MY HEART at all times! Even though my cloud is building back up again… I WILL ALWAYS RELY ON GODS SMILE AS THIS MOST INFLUENTIAL COUNTENANCE IN MY CLOUD. 

Proverbs 16:15 “When the KING SMILES, there is life; his FAVOR refreshes like a spring rain.”