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“Tears,” Spurgeon once declared, “are
liquid prayer.” Sitting on a plane twelve years ago, returning from
a ten-week sabbatical in America, I found myself engulfed in tears
at the prospect of a particular person dying. As it turned out, he
lived for well over another decade, but I knew that this “grief
ahead of time” was the result of a heavenly prompting. There need be
nothing morbid about such anticipatory grief: rather, it can be
clean and purifying.
In the summer of 2005, our forty-two
month sojourn on the Shetland Islands came to an abrupt end. There
were two main reasons for this; the immense grief and pressure Ros
was experiencing at work, and the fact that the Lord had told me
through a variety of prophets that once the prayer conference I had
been sent to organise had taken place, my time there would be
complete.
A few weeks before we left, three
thousand athletes made their way to the islands to participate in
the Inter-Island Games. As we watched my friends in the table tennis
team giving their all against players from around the world, I found
myself dissolving repeatedly into floods of tears.
By the end of the week there were no
more tears to shed, and I knew that my grief over leaving this
unique phase of our lives in those amazing islands had been
resolved. As a result, I was able to make the most of my remaining
time on the island. It proved much harder for Ros, who had less
opportunity to prepare herself for the transition. She loves the
people of Shetland more than any other people-group or community we
have ever been part of. She continued to fill up with tears for
nearly two years every time she thought of the place and the people
who meant so much to her.
Ros finally obtained release when
Chris and Vicky Pemberton came round to pray for her. With a
delightful combination of compassion and spiritual authority they
set her free from the grief which had been locked up inside her for
so long
Ros had left the islands “greeting”
(which means “weeping” in the Shetland dialect). Six months after
this time of prayer, we enjoyed a delightful return trip to
Shetland, in which the Lord took Ros from “greeting” to a deep and
welcoming “greeting”. |
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