Third Trial: Sell All You Have and Follow Me

I invite you, having read my previous posts, to pray for Philip as he undergoes his own fiery trial at present. And, though not new to trials, I am new to blogging so it may be helpful for my readers to be aware of that.

In my next trial I did just that–sold all I had. Well, all except my children. I couldn’t sell them, they are too precious. But there was an extraordinary event towards the end of my time in this furnace when an angel actually took them out of my van while I slept and left them on the side of the road! You’ll have to stay tuned to gain understanding of that.

Sometimes I wondered if this was a trial of my own imagination, but when I look back now I can see an immense amount of work done in me. It purged me predominantly of fear and pride, so that today when I do some silly thing that would embarrass most people, I feel nothing. Often I will burst out laughing at myself. And I love laughing at the most inane things.

It started when my children were young with the two eldest established in homeschooling. We had not yet been to Melbourne and it was before Philip returned to us during his sojourn into alcoholism and attempted suicides, the last time as of now that we saw him. I was desperate to get off welfare and live by faith in the Most High. Father put on my heart to test Him by cancelling all my government payments. For a while we lived on my meagre savings, then on some superannuation I managed to redeem early due to severe financial hardship.

During this time we celebrated Passover and always had a seder like the Jews. We had just sat down to dinner when an enormous storm passed over our house. It became so black outside we could hardly see where we were inside the house. We all rushed to the window to see the storm, at which time hail rained down. It was over in a few minutes and passed out to sea, but I was awestruck because the darkness occurred precisely at the time Yahshua hung on the cross. This fact was not noticed by me only. I was also reminded of Scriptures such as PSALM 68 and ISAYAH 45:8.

When food was becoming scarce on our table, I had a dream in which we were just sitting down to eat plates of nothingness and there was a knock on the door. I rushed over before flinging it open. Standing outside was a motorbike courier dressed from head to toe in black and red leather with his helmet still on. Now I happen to know that red and black are YHWH’s favourite colours. I know because I asked Him once! Red of course for sacrifice, and black actually symbolizes, not evil or darkness, but power and authority. If you do not agree, think about GENESIS before the light. There was darkness, but evil had not come into the world then as the angels had not been created. Anyway, my courier angel visitor gave me two boxes for which I signed. Both were filled with vouchers: one for my car and all it would need, and one for my life or everything else I would need to sustain us. In some of my dark nights ahead when I had nothing–no food, no money, no petrol, a broken exhaust pipe held together by wire and a tin can, and hungry children–I would remember this dream and that YHWH supplies all our needs according to His riches in Messiah Yahshua.

Eventually we had to relinquish our little flat and move into a caravan park. I sold as much I could bring myself to part with at the time, but it wasn’t enough. So I sold more to enable us to fit into our Econovan comfortably. When money was so short we had to leave the caravan park, the owners dishonestly refused to return my bond, all that I had left. Deep in my heart I believed Father would reward my faith somehow by providing for us miraculously.

Despite selling almost everything, in retrospect I think we still had too much. Jed slept in the back across a stack of suitcases. Ranyhyn slept on the three seater in the middle. I slept across the front seat with my legs either up on the bottom of the window, curled up, or down on the floor. This was so we could be ready to depart any unsavoury area quickly if necessary. But also because a friend of mine related to us how he awoke from sleep in the back of his van one morning to find someone had broken in and was driving him down the road! Gabriel was still little enough to sleep on the floor in front of me, passenger side. He later slept on a bag of clothes in front of Ranyhyn.

The first night out like this I parked the van in a public car park next to a playground. The children slept peacefully, but I sat up nervously for most of the night. It didn’t take many nights before I too relaxed and would sleep peacefully, confident we had angels all around. In my seaside city, picnic areas with free bar-be-ques and showers abounded, so as long as we had food we were always clean and fed with hot food. It was said to me by someone we looked the least like street people he had ever seen. It was also legal to camp out in the parks for a night or two.

What Father put on my heart to do was encircle the city with prayer and claim it for Him. Every night, therefore, I would park in a different place and pray a wall of fire around the city. The very first prayer was said at the bridge entry to one end. A friend was to come join me in this prayer but neglected to show up. I was shocked to learn that on the Sunday following this, at the church closest to the bridge, a Baptist Church, the pastor had dropped dead in his pulpit as he gave his morning sermon!

It has been prophesied that revival in Australia will start in Brisbane. The city I prayed for then was Redcliffe, called ‘First Settlement City’, so I believed the revival would commence here and that was the reason I was to claim it.

We managed to live on about $20 a week. This paid for $2 of tithe, $5 worth of petrol, laundry, and a bit of food. Sometimes we went to charities. My grandmother gave us some money most weeks when we would take her on an outing from her retirement hostel. She did not know we were living on the street. In fact I didn’t tell any of my friends, though some of them may have guessed. It got around town about us. The children would do their home school on a picnic table next to the sea. In other circumstances it would have been an amazing life.

I became known as ‘the lady in the blue van’. Sometimes Christians would come to make our acquaintance, wanting to know how we did it and what made my faith so strong. These were living in their own particular brand of fiery trial. Little did they know this warrior of faith was still a child herself who crawled into Daddy’s lap every dark night crying, ‘When are You coming to save us out of this?’ And like Job, ‘Why don’t You come?’ And there were times we simply had no food at all and went hungry, like the Israelites in the wilderness. One time we slept out front of a police station for three nights without fuel. Not once did anyone come to ask if we were alright.

We met some amazing people. A friend had told us about Michael, who looked like an angel, she said. He was also living on the street. One morning we all sat at a table near the beach while the children did schoolwork. It was a bright warm sunny day. Blessedly it seldom rained for us while we were on this trial. A lovely looking young man in a rumpled suit walked straight over to us from where he had apparently slept on the beach and introduced himself. It was Michael. He spent the day with us. He was full of grace, soft-spoken, and well-mannered, deflecting questions about his origins. At dinner time all we had to eat were some instant noodles which we shared with him. When it came time to sleep we were in the van, and I was feeling uncomfortable about having to boot him out. There wasn’t really room for us both to sleep there and I felt it was inappropriate. He reluctantly, it seemed, left us to go back to the beach. That was the last I saw of Michael for some time. Later that night I felt remorseful at my selfishness thinking we could both have slept sitting up. There is always more we can give, even when we think we have given our all.

Some weeks or months later I needed several hundred dollars to pay my children’s school fees, for more books for them, and my RACQ (breakdown service) bill all due by 4:30 pm that day. I was believing YHWH for it. I had not a  cent. We pulled up into the beach park where we had met Michael and who should be there but the man himself. Again we spent most of the day together. But this time, after I had told him my needs, not expecting him like the last time to have any money at all, he asked, ‘How much do you need?’ The rest of the day we spent at the secondhand shop buying for himself a new pair of dress pants–he was always immaculately dressed in a suit–at the bank withdrawing money for me, going to the RACQ to pay my fees there, going to the school half an hour away to pay for fees and books there, and filling up a trolleyful of food for us at the supermarket. He asked that if I ever had the money I would pay him back. That night he left us to stay in a hostel. I never saw him again. But he was my angel driver on a special trip I took in a trance-dream at the end of this trial, the one who took my children out of the car.

Michael was different to anyone I’d ever met. I was impatient to get to the bank and school in time to pay the fees. But he went agonizingly slowly so that we made it at the last possible moment. Then when he handed over about $300 to the receptionist at the Christian school, he wouldn’t let the money go. She had to pull it out of his hand. He was saying we were very poor and they should give the books and fees to us free. It was embarrassing, but I had often thought the same about this school. It was run as a business with no provision for such as I had always been, a widow with orphans, or the very poor who found it hard to afford their prices.

It has often occurred to me he may have been the archangel. One day I will know. If he is, his angel underlings guard us day and night even now. There were numerous occasions we would have our needs met at the last minute, or after a few days of no food at all. We were accommodated in houses of Christians for a few days or weeks at a time. At first our situation humiliated me to the point I would open the back of the van only inches so as not to show all our possessions in there. By the end I would fling it open without caring who saw or knew.

After Michael blessed us, I told Father I would never fail to trust Him again, even if I had to live in the van forever. We would thereafter walk on His Holy Highway. It was less than a month before doubts crept in again making my end of that agreement go lopsided.

Eleven months after this journey started, the friend with the runaway van asked me to come down to NSW to help him look after his aged mother when he took her for a weekend away. I was a nurse by profession. After some adventures with that I left him to go see a friend in Cootamundra who ran a prophetic bulletin. This man gave me $50 when we left. That got me to Wagga Wagga nearby and there it was that I finally had had enough. We were far from home, with no money and not enough faith to get me back to Queensland. I went back on to welfare, questioning why Father ever had us run this particular race in the first place.

Back in our city of Redcliffe I went to the post office and found a letter from David, a prophet in Melbourne. I had, in desperation, written him to ask if he would seek YHWH about our situation. He–with caravan, will travel–wrote he was coming up to meet me. Me?! How honourable. He was due to arrive shortly after our return, which he did. To my immense surprise when his fellowship in Melbourne had prayed about us, Father had told them to invite us to come live with them in their community.

There was, to my mind, no way this could not have been from the Almighty Himself. So I accepted David’s offer. Another of the fellowship members flew up to accompany us down. David was continuing on to Cairns. The night Ric got there, I entered a curious trance-like state in which I was fighting and killing Sisera, the archrival of Deborah from the Bible. I think Ric and David decided I was a bit nutty and I wondered later myself. I threw a lot of stuff out and packed Ric’s bag into the ever diminishing space of my van’s interior so it fitted perfectly.

We left early next morning, Ric driving almost the entire way, with me still strangely entranced, although being in it I did not recognize the fact. At one rest stop I walked into a huge spider in its web. Ranyhyn screamed pointing to it, but I just brushed it aside and laughed hilariously! That night we stayed in a van park at Glen Innes where I was unable to sleep for a demonic attack. I was so afraid my legs would not stop shaking. Father showed me some surprising revelations about David’s fellowship and my own life. During the night I had a deliverance from my fear, while Ric and the children slept. A huge black jagged rock was taken out of my heart. I felt angels with swords battling for me against demons lodged in my flesh. They were trying to avoid being cast out, jumping all around under my skin.

Father said I was going on a trip to Heaven with my children. I wondered how I would breathe in  space, Heaven being beyond the dome or firmament of the Earth. Suddenly the new day dawned and I heard Father say, ‘Tonight’. With that I jumped up and got ready for that day’s journey.

We reached Bathurst that night. Ric said he would drive throughout and Father said I was to go to sleep. This was no small feat for me as I had become quite distrustful of Ric’s driving. But fall asleep I did, while staying aware of the physical realm. Ric became Michael whom I had met in Redcliffe, who became or was–I know not–the archangel. En route through the stars and galaxies, the van having become a space ship, Michael stopped to take my children one by one out and leave them in the deep darkness of space. If I had woken to try to stop this, I would have disobeyed the Most High, so I let them go, fear and dread wringing my soul. Along a little further I heard the children whimper in their sleep in the back of the van, and knew they were safe and it had been merely a test for me. Never had I been more relieved, excepting perhaps when they were born.

We finally came to the brilliant light of Heaven, sort of slowly so I would not be blinded. There for eight hours I underwent a kind of rebirth where many of my fears were burnt off. Until at last I was rendered naked and carefully carried and placed by an angel under Yahshua Himself on a cross. He looked down at me with love. Out of His side poured blood and water showering me with its warmth, for it was a cold night.

Father showed me children I would have and had desired since Gabriel’s birth. On condition though that I give them up for now and have only Him. I accepted that gladly. He also showed me Philip as a black dog lying on His lap, waiting it seemed for me all this time. And a wedding scene, me being dressed as a bride. A wedding night…

When Ric woke me up the next morning the trance-dream ended. The trance state, however, continued for some time. My children and I left Melbourne after two weeks having met a number of men at the fellowship who I believe are to figure prominently in my future. We returned to Brisbane where I found the letter from Philip at the post office. And that concludes this trial.

Today I look at my children who are with me and am thankful for that time. We survived. We were never not going to. Father did not come through in the way I expected, but in truth, He gave me much much more than I could ever think or hope for. He gave me Himself on a wooden cross. And if Philip in such sin as he was, had laid on His lap all the while, how much more so must we have been wrapped tightly in Father’s arms.