Day 33 - JOURNEY'S & JOURNALS - CHICKEN SOUP FORTHE SOUL

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DAY -33  Starts at Sundown Friday Seven days until the Day of Atonement

Write it down... make it plain,... and share it!  - Chicken Soup for the Soul

Habakkuk 2:2  Then the Lord answered me and said: 

“Write the vision And make it plain on tablets, 

That he may run who reads it

As a prayer and intercession group we are on a prophetic journey, on a trip to new places, we saw exciting things, experienced moments, that we will not want to forget.. and that is important enough to note. 

Journey's are most profitable over the long haul, when we journal.
When we share it with others, it becomes more ingrained in us. 

The prophet Habakkuk says it this way...

Step One:  write the vision down... 

That is the writing portion and there are many people who journal their life experiences.

Both their natural journeys and their spiritual journeys. Maybe you are one who does, if so then there is also a second step necessary before sharing.  

Step Two:  and make it plain. 

I like to think of this like the process of making a reduction sauce. My wife is a gourmet cook and the best soups and turkey pot pie owe their robust flavor to a reduction sauce. Inorder to extract the robust flavor, all the bones and skin are boiled in a pot, the meat falls off the bone and is set aside for use later. The juices and water mixture is put over the flame. As it simmers on the stove, the volume is reduced significantly but the intensity of the flavor is also increased significantly. The same should be true of your vision or dream even a prophetic series of pictures. 

Step Three:  That... he may run who reads it. 
That means we have to share it, messengers used to run from town to town, hamlet to hamlet, village to village and read the message of the king, to those who lived there. It was the way that the 'word' got out, today of course we have instant messaging, smart phone twitter, Facebook and many means of communication, but you may have noticed most of the messages are not life changing. The flavor of most is mild almost tasteless. 

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APPLICATION 
Let's say for a moment you just had an incredible dream or a vision, the details, colors,  actions, words, and feelings it produced in you are almost too much to take in... especially in a dream,
YOU ONLY HAVE ABOUT FIVE MINUTES TO CAPTURE THE DETAILS before they begin to fade from memory. 

In Step One:  
You must move quickly, to capture all the details you can remember, start with the high level happenings and then move to the sub plots and then to the details. During this step, No detail is too small.  Record all the colors, record your reactions to what was said or done, record times, dates, words spoken, names, places, funny out of the ordinary details, people doing odd things, record it all. 

then be diligent like a investigative reporter (journal - ist), get all the juicy details.
Draw sketches in your journal, draw layouts of complex positions of people and places, floor plans, architectural details that stick out to you; Perhaps a bird's eye view of movements of people and things in your vision or dream. 

In Step Two:  

We place all of our observations, our verbose rambling, our haggling over the details, in its entirety over the fire (not literally of course). We let the vision or dream simmer for a while (a day or two).  Gradually All extraneous details can be boiled away, once we have extracted their flavor.  Before we are done, we will go back and fish out the bones and the gristle.  What is left, can be organized to make a clear point, poignant (full of flavor) and fluid, easy to pour into the next person, in order to bring them the flavor of what God has said.  

In Step 3:  If we want our readers, to be able to run with the message of our vision, we must first write it down, secondly make it plain, and finally share it. So make it fluid,  easy to swallow, like a good chicken soup, full of health and strength for the soul.

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YOUR CHALLENGE
So here is my challenge to you, if you had an impression, a vision, a picture, a sensation, a Scripture, or any other thing. (that happened while we were at the Blue Earth River or during these 40 days.) Then please follow these three steps.... NOW,   before you forget the details. 

1. Write it down, capture all the details no matter how weird they seem.  You won't believe how many people come and tell me of a vision or a dream and they have only a sketchy outline. When I press them for more details, they have forgotten them, because they did not write it down right in the moment. 
2. Make it plain, I know I have done this myself and others have done it to me, we share too much information! We have an out of this world experience and then we have to tell people, every detail (after all they mean so much to us) and step by step how they came about. In short we are making a full feature film out of our experience because it was so real to us. Trust me he details and the indirect hints of interconnections will not mean anything to the other person.  Believe me when I tell you, they are thinking, "okay I can tell that you are excited about this, but...

• What's the point?" 
• What can I take away from this? 
• What's the bottom line? 

So in short, making it plain, is to boil away all the cool secret meanings, when they are only shadows and are not pertinent to the message.

You might want to make sure you include something like this in step two;"The bottom line is ___________!", 

or "What we can take away from this is _________________!".

3. He or she may run, who reads it. this phrase can mean one of two things. 

1. The first meaning can be explained by the king's herald, when messengers used to run from city to city carrying the news for the king, they wore an official uniform and they would read the decrees from the scroll; that they might run, who have the job to read it aloud to the kings subjects. 
2. The Second meaning could be the case when a message is posted on facebook, google+, or community bulletin board. Those who happen to read it, can put it into application in their own lives, i.e. run with it.

Both meanings require making it plain and sharing it either through an official network or an informal posting of it for the world to see. 

Okay, I am waiting with great expectation to hear from the group who went to Blue Earth River, and by the look of things, so are about 100-250 others who come here everyday to hear what the Lord is doing through us, in us and in our region. We should be diligent to write it down, make it plain and share it so others can run their race.

Next Thursday night we will have testimonies at the GAP our weekly meeting and we hope to get them out to all of you via this blog. 

We would love to hear from the rest of you too... is God speaking to you about your region? what is prompting you to do? 

Various writings from the past
The Road Not Taken
At Home In MN