What do you do, when you don’t know what to do?
Getting a “prophetic word” is a great thing, when it confirms what God has already been speaking to your heart about.
But in my experience, as one who has been trained and mentored by several prophetic people, and studied prophecy, I’d say that it’s far better when you wait upon the Lord to guide your steps. Waiting can be miserable, but people, friends, family, pastors, prophets, they can be wrong sometimes.
During my decade and a half of financial ruin, discouragement, waiting I’ve discussed with many in the past, I didn’t have anyone to ask, “What is God saying, why am I going through this”? I had to wait, often to the very last second, for God to intervene, every month for about 14 years. God always brought what I needed, but always at the last second.
The past few years, I watched friends and family pass a way, and the largest and heaviest confusion came, I didn’t have the luxury of finding someone to get prophetic encouragement from, I didn’t have the luxury through much of it, to wait months for answers.
I’ll give an example, of a prophetic team getting it wrong.
My brother awoke me early one morning, yelling for me. I got up and ran to the restroom. On the floor was our father. He had fallen, he had apparently been there for several hours.
The restroom was a wall away from my room, but I had been so tired and stayed up late that night I had fallen into an unusually deep sleep.
Our father had a stroke. We got the local fire department there pretty fast once, they are only five blocks away, and they rushed dad to the hospital.
After consulting with the medical professionals, they informed us of our fathers condition, he wasn’t going to make it long term. The blood clot that caused the stroke was in a very small network of inoperable brain vessels.
Long story, condensed to the point, my brother and I decided to take turns staying with our father, and I knew there was a healing meeting at a local place I’d been to many times before. I’d been prayed for and healed several times there, and my mom had been prayed for there too. So I decided to go get prayed for as a proxy.
A proxy simply means, my father obviously couldn’t be there, so I went in his place, to get pray for him, in his place.
There was a couple team there that I hadn’t seen before, it was probably due to having just come out of the covid lockdowns and restrictions.
I told them why I was there, and they seemed unfamiliar with the concept of praying for a proxy, which was fine. They seemed somewhat hesitant, to pray, so they prayed for me for the most part, rather than my father, which seemed really odd to me.
I was in absolute desperation, and I wasn’t looking to be comforted with the loss of my father who was still very much alive at that moment. Then they prayed for my father, I can’t recall what they prayed, but it seemed pretty faithless at the time.
That would have been fine, they should have stopped right then, but instead, one of the two, decided to give a “Prophetic word”. they said, “You’re father is going to recover, he’ll have a full recovery from this and live”. I didn’t feel any confirmation in my spirit that what this person was “prophesying”, was accurate. Instead, warnings from my mentors about the prophetic, when to prophesy, how to prophesy, areas to be careful about, came to mind.
I thanked them, left, and went home to pray. But i didn’t have peace about the “prophetic word”, about my father. It just seemed off, no matter how much I wanted it to be true.
Instead of recovering, our father wasn’t making the progress doctors and we hoped while he was in assisted nursing home. Eventually they urged us to put him into a hospice, where we hoped he would get better care and therapy, but instead he degraded and passed away, which is essentially the purpose of hospice. In hospice the goal is to make the person comfortable until they pass away.
After my father passed, there were all kinds of new challenges to encounter, requiring faith and hope, and it took everything within me at that point to keep trusting God. I’d been through bad times before, great losses, I knew what it was like to be totally dependant on God, this season was similar.
I was with a friend over lunch one day during all of this, someone who knew everything I’d ever gone through, knew all about my prophetic training and experiences. They were going through a challenging time. We were talking and they blurted out something like, “I don’t believe in the prophetic”. Not the exact words, but basically it was a complete dismissal of everything I’d shared with them over many years, my ministry, my training, and I was struggling with the false prophetic word about me father that I had received.
Well, those things, combined with other long term life experiences that didn’t go as I hoped, threw my faith into a spiritual hole. My ability to hear or see prophetically just went black, like someone had turned off the T.V.
Their disbelief on top of everything else just short circuited the prophetic gift. I’d only had that happen one other time in my life, and that was in the mid 1990’s. It took around 5 years to regain even a little of the prophetic hearing back then, and many more years to come close to how clearly I used to be able to hear.
So, here I was, I’d lost my father and been wounded by the seed of disbelief, unworthiness, feeling unloved by God who didn’t heal him, a friend who I used to consider a person of faith and wise council telling me he no longer believed, and a ton of new circumstances and challenges unlike I had previously known. My prophetic mentors who were enormously accurate previously passed away so I could talk with them, the church I’d been connected to was in disarray, because its pastor passed during the pandemic. I felt lost.
I consulted many people I consider to be wise, and got little help. Few of them had encountered what I’ve gone through. They understood the concept intellectually, but lacked the experience to understand nor gained wisdom that experience provides.
I had lots of counsel from experts in their fields who gave advice, that conflicted with other experts in the same field giving advice.
I received lots of unsolicited advice too.
So what do you do, when you’re not certain what to do, the clock is ticking, the “wise council’ is conflicting, and there is no sound “Prophetic Insight” available?
You look at what God already said, in the bible.
If you took the entire applicable parts of the bible, (Not all parts of the bible are applicable, much of it is historical).
What did God say?
1. Over and over God has said. “Trust Me”
2. I have an individual plan for you, but you don’t need to know what it is.
3. I will take care of your “needs”. Not wants, but needs.
4. I will provide clothes, food, shelter.
5. Do try to figure it out.
6. Remind yourself that, “I’ve got this”.
7. I will direct your steps.
8. I will guide your path.
This is not about church, going to church, needing a pastor or church member telling you what to do, how to do it, etc. That just becomes part of the fluff, when your in dire straits. I’ve never found running to a pastor for advice or council to be very helpful, sometimes making things worse.
I once worked at a famous seminary where many of the top pastors were taught, and came across those studying to be pastors who you wouldn’t want to babysit your children or watch your house if you were on vacation.
I came across homosexuals in the pastor programs who were living in sexual immorality while studying. Sexual immorality is inconsistent with the bible whether it be with the same gender or the opposite gender.
The point is simply, we tend to assume that a leader of a church or ministry has some kind of special anointing on them, when in reality most are just good story tellers, speakers and lecturers. Most haven’t done the things that Jesus told his disciples, “You’ll do the things I have done and even greater things”. Pastors are just people with a degree in pastoring. All doctors are not good doctors, all mechanics are good mechanics, and not all pastors or teachers within the church are good pastors or teachers within a church.
It’s only been the things I’ve found in the bible, putting my trust and hope in God, that has brought me through the difficult things. Because the word of God is true and reliable.
There have always been people around me who have said, “You’re doing the wrong thing.” or whispering to someone else, “He’s making the wrong decision”.
But in my long experience, I’ve seen God reroute me, close doors, etc. whenever I’ve headed in the wrong way, as long as I was trusting God from the start.
God has led me through some really poopy life events that freaked me out. Yet, years later, I can see how those bad things, helped create the faith to trust God here in my future, here in the present.
Proverbs 20:24
A person’s steps are directed by the Lord. How then can anyone understand their own way?
There are lots of promises from God, and declarations of His dependable character within the bible. Find them, hold on to them, and trust God as you go through whatever it is you’re going through.
