Spiritual Encounters

John
Banks Doug  Nick Malachi Dom Ben

First off, I want to include pictures of each of my team members. I realized I didn’t do that on my last post and would like to on this post. The first picture is John from California. Next is our alumni team leader Banks from South Carolina. Then it’s Doug from Pennsylvania. Then Nick from West Virginia. The picture after that is Malachi from Kansas. Then Dom from California. Finally the last picture is Ben from Pennsylvania. I love my team SO much, I couldn’t have asked for a better team and I’m SO excited for the next eight months together! So as promised in my last blog……….my encounters with the Lord and the Holy Spirit over the past month or so. I’ll preface by saying the churches I’ve grown up didn’t really talk about the workings of the Spirit. In fact, the only things I had actually seen of that sort were all clearly fake, staged healings and speaking in tongues I’d seen on YouTube by charismatic prosperity Gospel preachers. And so I wasn’t entirely sure what I believed about those things coming into training camp. My first encounter was one of the first nights. I was really struggling, feeling like I didn’t belong, like I wasn’t spiritually mature enough to be at training camp and all together feeling really depressed. As I was on the floor during worship not knowing what to do, my leader Banks came over and started praying over me praying for everything I was struggling with and had been thinking about and I didn’t tell him anything beforehand. I fully believe God told him what to pray for me. As with all these encounters I’ll mention, you’ll see there is no explanation besides it being God and the Holy Spirit moving. Next, again in worship, Banks’ sister Emmery, another one of the team leaders, came over to me and told me she felt God told her to tell me that He loved me and was proud of me, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of Who He is and what’s He done for me through Christ. Again, that was something God has been teaching me throughout training camp, and something I needed to hear in that moment. Again, I hadn’t told her anything before she said that, in fact, I had barely even talked to her beforehand. I actually had a third encounter like the previous two, where this time one of the serve team guys came up to me and told me some things he’d heard from God to tell me, namely that I’d be a leader on my team and that he had the image of a soldier when he saw me. Once again, (you can probably see a pattern at this point) I’d never talked to him before, and I have a feeling too, that somehow I’ll be a leader on this team in the coming eight months. One of the craziest things that I’ve experienced was on one of the revival nights. My teammate Dom was slain in the Spirit! He started laughing and giggling and literally the whole rest of the revival night he was laughing, jumping up and down and rolling on the floor. Even afterward he was laughing on the way back to his tent and even after getting in his tent for a good thirty more minutes. I’d never experienced anything like that before. I’ve experienced prophecies being prophesied here, people speaking in tongues, and multiple healings too. To go more in depth on the healings, one of the coolest was seeing my squad mate Noah being healed of ticks/turets that he has dealt with for years. Another squad mate Audrey, was healed of a gluten allergy. Another thing with Dom, he told us that he might have the gift of interpreting tongues. He said that because there have been two different times someone has spoken in tongues and he didn’t realize it until afterwards when someone told him they’d been speaking in tongues. He thought they were just talking normally. He understood every word. One of the craziest things so far was the spiritual warfare the X squad, our sister gap year squad, went through. So one night a bunch of them heard, saw, and smelled demons and experienced a lot of fear. Some of them even saw the same demon at different times throughout the night and described it the exact same way without talking together in between. The most recent experience was actually today though. I went off into the woods and was praying through some things I was really struggling with including some insecurities and feeling like I wasn’t seen and that I was always left out and ignored. God answered both of my prayers directly through His word that I read afterwards. I won’t get into the first one because it’s pretty personal, but my God shot (where I saw God and His character in my reading for the day) which I literally saw six times in my reading of the Gospels and what Jesus did was God sees. God hears. God cares. God understands. I saw that so clearly in the way Jesus saw people, He cared for people, He loved and wanted the rejects and weirdos. So I wrote afterwards being led to write all this by the Holy Spirit, God understands your pain. You aren’t a reject to Him. He loves you SO much and is SO SO proud of you. He doesn’t just take you—He WANTS you. You are His beloved. God is SO good!!! I literally teared up realizing just how much He loves me and wants me and sees me even if no one else does. I’m so glad God is revealing Himself to me, and proving to me there’s SO much more! I’m so hungry for it and ready to experience all God has for me. 
Until next time, 

Luke                                                                       the beloved son of the King of the Universe