Sometimes, my thoughts are so small. I think I know, because it makes sense to me. One of the lovely things about becoming more humble is that I am actually open to a different type of revelation. It is being teachable in a moment I hear, don’t understand, AND don’t discard.

When I lived on the west coast, I belonged to a spiritual community that gathered in a building that was previously a bar. This group thought outside religious boxes. For fun, we would gather instruments and amplification, and go out to the boardwalk by the ocean. We would worship the Father of Lights with no agenda other than to offer Him what He is due. Sometimes we would repent to the crowds that came to listen, for keeping the party inside the ‘church’. Those years brought life to an area of my heart. Moving in the Light healed what moving in darkness had crippled.

One of the leaders was a guy named Mark. Mark was a punk hooked on heroin and headed for fame in the rock-n-roll industry when Father revealed his love to him. His passion to love God back made him incredibly safe for me. The transformation happening in my heart was so real! It was in those days that the Lord started softening my hardest days by giving me songs. I even shared some of my songs with Mark, on a dorky little cassette tape, risking that he’d make fun of me and talk to others about my stupidness. I remember being afraid the next time I saw him. He came straight towards me. He gently said, he felt like we were kin. I wept later, at the beauty of it. Part of a family that was on the side of Love.

Mark went home, he passed away in 1999.

A few years later, I was driving into a city in the Midwest to go to a gathering of a different spiritual community. I was singing, alone in my car. Then, Mark was in the passenger seat. I knew it was him, although he was not physically in detail there, the way I had known him when he was in skin on the earth. He said he had a message for me from the Lord. He went on to share that every time I worshipped, in heaven it was his gain, because he had sowed into my gift while he was yet on the earth.

Again, I wept. How small are my thoughts, that I would imaging the barrier between heaven and earth to be to very black and white, and understandable to my very small mind.

May he continue to gain today, as I worship. Selah.