An Unusual Journey

As a teacher and a story teller, I love narratives about men and women who, in the midst of regular life, hear the voice of God, and it absolutely transforms everything.

So many times, I've told the story of Abraham and Sarah:

A couple of senior citizens, sitting out on their porch one day planning their Alaskan cruise, when God shows up! He tells them to leave the comfort and familiarity of everything they know, and to go to the place that He'll show them. They didn't even know what lay ahead, they simply knew that if God was in it, that's where they wanted to be.

This journey to the Atlantic Coast of Canada has been much like this for our family. What would cause well-established leaders to uproot from a spiritual community in Kansas City where God was at work, and circumstances were going well, to set out for a place that's largely unknown and there are no guarantees of anything? If we're not on drugs and we haven't lost our minds, why would we do something like this?
Well, looking back over the journey, we see it's been the voice of God. The story goes like this:

1) In the summer of 2005 we took a trip to the east coast of Canada for the first time. As I was sitting on the rocks @ a place called Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia talking to God, I felt the distinct impression that I was going to live there. Almost immediately after that Jen turned to me and said, “I want to live here.”

I figured, "That's just what people do on vacations! Everyone thinks they want to live in a beautiful place that they visit for the first time!"

But a few minutes later, the swirl continued...

2) Jen went into the post office in Peggy's Cove, the exact same place she had gone 23 years earlier as a 7 year old girl, and she met the same lady there that she met when she was 7!

This was either a really strange coincidence or something was stirring.

3) Just a day or so later we went to a historic church in Halifax on a tour. I met the tour guide and struck up a conversation. He said “I moved out here from Victoria, B.C. (my home city) 15 years ago." As we talked, I learned he had been a part of the church I grew up in and my parents are still active part of today.

4) That Sunday we visited the St. Croix Vineyard in New Brunswick. Gary and Joy Best and their family just happened to be there on vacation. In talking to them, we discovered they were visiting the same places we were in a different order.

Either God was at work, or I had somehow just stepped into an M. Night Shyamalan movie...

See, these things are what we know as “divine appointments.” God is setting up the circumstances around us. They're often very unusual, and you can feel the presence of God in them as they happen.

5) As we visited the Vineyard that day, Peter Fitch, the lead pastor there and Dean of St. Stephen's University told us about a group of Scottish Presbyterians on the Atlantic coast who had been praying and were waiting for a great move of God in their region. As he spoke, something inside us knew that we had a part to play in this.

6) We arrived back in Kansas City, and over the coming weeks we just kept sensing this draw to the east coast of Canada. It was very unusual. Through a prophetic puzzle of sorts, God had deposited something into our hearts that we could not shake.

7) The sense of calling continued, and then a little over 2 months later, my friend John MacGirvin, not knowing the things that had developed in our lives, prophesied to me: “You came from the west, but you’re going to the east. There’s a move of God coming to the Vineyard in Eastern Canada and you'll be a part of it. It's a healing movement that will start in the east and move across the nation to the west. " He also said “East is Best. And Best is East. There’s something around Gary Best that is significant in this time." (It was a short time later that Gary and Joy Best relocated from the West Coast of Canada to the East.)

8) In December 2005, I had a dream where a messenger appeared and said to me “Call Larry Levy.” Larry is the senior leader of the Halifax Metro Vineyard in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

9) While I would never endorse playing Bible roulette, in January of 2006, I was praying about Halifax, and had an impression that if I opened my Bible God would give me something about the ocean as a sign. I immediately opened the Bible to Psalm 29:3 “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD thunders over the mighty waters."

I thought- "That's got to be random chance- I'm going to try that again":
I opened Bible again to Habakkuk 2:14 “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

10) That same day, I shared the sense of a call to the city of Halifax with Mark Warner, our senior leader at the Vineyard in Kansas City. He looked at me and said, “I’m reading a book about Halifax right now!”

Confidence continued to grow that God was setting this whole thing up!

11) The next month I was driving and praying about going to the east coast of Canada. A car pulled in front and license plate read “LITEHOUSE.” (The lighthouse is synomous with the Atlantic Coast). These were all tokens; kisses from God reminding us that He’s at work in the midst of this.

12) In March of 2006 John MacGirvin prophesied again. He said he saw that I had been plowing a field for about 3.5 years and experiencing a time of harvest. Then he saw me entering a season of rest and refreshing for a short time before another season of plowing began. He reiterated that I’d have a part to play in the healing revival coming to the Vineyard in Eastern Canada. He saw the work expanding into many different fields (places throughout the nation).

13) I suppose I take a lot of convincing because later that month I was asking God if we were really supposed to leave Kansas City and go east. Immediately a car pulled up in front of me, and the license plate read “CYA BYE.”

14) We went to Vineyard Canada’s National Conference which took place in Halifax region in the summer of 2006. God's Spirit was with us powerfully, and we saw remarkable healings and prophetic revelation take place in a number of ministry times. There was a sense of something significant happening there.

15) During the week we were out for the conference, we visited the Halifax Vineyard two weeks in a row. We immediately felt right at home and engaged in ministry times with the kingdom of God breaking in with words of knowledge and healing.

Those were just a few of the events that have led us this far. We arrived in Halifax 10 days ago, and we're beginning to find our feet in the midst of boxes and chaos!
We have a great sense of God at work.
One of the things I've learned is that if we keep our eyes open, and our hearts attentive, we'll discover He's doing things all around us. Saty tuned for more as the journey unfolds...