Mark Marshall

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Kingdom Community

Am I Friend Enough…

I love a girl, she is not mine by birth, but by the spirit. If I had a daughter she would be the one I would choose!
Of course I know she isn’t perfect, but to me she is. In God’s eyes she is known as one of the ‘favorites’. She has
been such a friend to me and my family for about 20 years. And back in the days when everyone and their brother
couldn’t get away from me and my family fast enough; there she was. I think when the scriptures talk about; “there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother”; I’m pretty sure she’s that friend to me.

She had complications during pregnancy, and had an emergency C Section. And by complications, I don’t mean it didn’t go as planned. And by emergency I don’t mean we couldn’t plan everything. I mean all hell broke loose! And the bottom line she just about stepped into glory. I talked to her husband a few days ago, and he told me the news and all the details. I mean like AFTER the emergency C Section she had a 3 hour surgery just to stop the bleeding.

And when I got the call I was on the way to a meeting that I could not get out of. But I was so distraught that I had to pull over and have a talk with Father. After I got my peace I fulfilled my meeting obligation. I got in my car, and immediately texted her husband for an update. When I got the update it was still not that great, but stable.

I remember hearing those words and thinking that I may not see her again. My heart was open and filled with presence. In that moment I had a thought; “Was I friend enough?” I mean was I real friend to the person that I truly love so much. I thought about how good of father I need to be to my sons. And even those in the faith. I thought about it all night didn’t sleep hardly at all. The next morning I got up and went to the hospital. But all the way there I was worshiping and realigning my thoughts to the fact that the one gift I have is ‘Friend’. Am I friend enough…. this has really occupied my thoughts these last few days.

I mean, am I friend enough?. If Kindness is my religion, then surely Friendship is my doctrine! I am exhorting you to be better friends to those that call you that. Ask yourself am I friend enough? I am going to do my best to stay connected and be a friend, because that is the highest calling on earth, to be called friend. Jesus said, I show you these things because you are friend. So to my ‘friends’ I say I love you and hope to catch up with you soon. Remember me in your prayers. Like St. Paul I hear, Oh wretched man that I am….

Much luv
MM

Kingdom Tales

The Tribe of ‘ouda’ and ‘ida’

This is an excerpt I ran across from a book that I am writing. This brought back a flood of memories. I would like to encourage you with the same encouragement that I received from the experience. I hope you are strengthened in your path, and resolved to not only desire an Outcome, but rather an Opportunity to Overcome! If this is a blessing to you please share!

From the Book…..I am Joseph:

My father was a great man of God. He had more kindness and character than any man I know up to this point. He was a man that I always wanted to grow up and be like. He was just, caring, and always looking out for others. He always put others needs before his own. In 2005 my father had a challenge of prostrate cancer. He was a tough old bird. He was one of those old school guys that would never go to the doctor until he was about dead. This was one of those times. Unfortunately he battled for a couple of years and finally went home to be with the Lord in July 2007.

In the last stages of his journey for the last four months I would come and just spend time with him and we would talk. Now you have to understand in the final stages of his life he was still cheerful and upbeat. One thing I noticed though he was having visitations of angels and the Lord himself! I remember talking to him at times and he would be staring up and the ceiling behind me just smiling. I would ask him what he was seeing, and he would say it was the angels of God. I will never forget on my last visit before he passed on we had a conversation that really changed my life. I never thought it would be the last time I ever talked to him but I’m grateful to God that we had that time together for the last few months of his life. Even on his death bed my dad was still sharing the mysteries of the Kingdom for all who would hear him. I am forever grateful to the Father for allowing me to be so blessed to have him as my earthly father.

I was talking to my dad that July afternoon. I asked him, “Dad I thank God that sometimes He allows us to circle back around in our lives and redo the bad choices we’ve made in our lives. And I think it’s His grace that allows us to sometimes undo the wrong choices we’ve made as well.” I was not prepared for the wisdom that proceeded out of his mouth. I was expecting the patented Christian response of the power and grace of God to allow us some sense of redemption and redo the wrong in our lives. What came out his mouth by way of the Holy One just shocked me and awakened me to another depth in God’s ways that I had not known until that point.

He said, “Son you have got to stop worrying over the choices you made in your life. The choices you made were the only choices you could have made at that time in your life. As a matter of fact God knew the choice you were going to make in that certain situation and made a plan for you according to the choice you had to make. So the choices that you made that you somehow think now were the wrong choices were actually the only choice for you to make. But what you must do is overcome the tribe of ‘ouda’ and ‘ida’. You know the tribe of woulda, shoulda, coulda, and if ida! More people get tripped up by those enemies than any other thing in their lives! If you live your whole life wondering if ida only said this, or I wished I coulda done something different here. And also if I wished now I woulda or I shoulda made a better choice in my life. If you don’t overcome these things you will never enter into the life that God has intended for you!”

Wow such wisdom pouring out of this man; it was like it was straight from heaven. I could sense a holy sensation fill the room as I listen to this great wisdom. I realized as I meditated on these words on the plane ride home that he was absolutely right. We have to overcome the tribe of the ‘ouda’ and ‘ida’. We must not spend wasted time and energy focusing on these enemies of our souls. These enemies keep us locked into the past. We spend tremendous amount of our lives trying to redo and change the effects of our past.

Divine Purpose , Kingdom Community

Hearts that BURN!

There is an amazing description of how spiritual events take place in our lives. In Luke 24 the resurrected Christ is walking veiled to the disciples, and they did not even know HIM!

They said to each other, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32

I wonder how many times we have stood in the presence of such greatness, and not really recognize the significance until later on.

I can tell you my story of a man that I heard of.  When I came to hear him speak. It totally changed my life forever.  As I heard him speak it made so much sense to my heart, but my mind and understanding could not connect the dots. These sayings of his created so much peace in my heart and chaos in my mind, to the point as to which I had never been before.  You have to understand, I am not a jump on the bandwagon guy.  But if I have experience in and belief, I’m going to annoy you with my bandwagoness… I don’t jump easily to something that is NEW just because it’s new. But I saw the effects in my own heart and those around me who heard.  These words offended my self righteous religiosity, but liberated the inside of me to no end. Very hard experience to describe to you.  It’s like me trying to tell you what water taste like!  Good luck with that one.

Hearing him over and over made so much sense to me. I was crushed by the fact that I had spent almost 20 years in the religious realm,  totally devoted to the God Realm and serving 110%! And I couldn’t believe that I had never heard any of this kind of truth!  And to hear him made me feel so blessed, like I can’t believe I’m hearing this! I saw the miracles and peoples’ response.

I remember eating dinner with him many times.  Every time without fail the wait staff were totally drawn to him. It was almost embarrassing, I mean every where we went, people just talked and talked and wanted to badly to be around him. It was so common, it was totally expected every where we went. We would have to peel him away from people. I remember him having a  2000.00 pair of shoes from some place in Italy, have no idea the name, but still ‘Hanging with the little people’. His heart was with the people, but his mission was to challenge the church leaders of the day. For that is the only way to create change overall.

As our relationship grew I would meet him on trips just to ‘hang out’ and serve in any way I could to make life easier on him. I learned through him not only the protocol of the church, and the Christianize, but also the deeper purpose of the mission.  I have never seen a place that wasn’t drawn to him. But I have to tell you, in the gathering of the elect there was a special presence. When you gather the spiritual, and those with perception of the anointing there was a very special Draw on the Presence.

And every single time this man opened his mouth whether in the pulpit, or at the dinner table, or in private; I was never ceased to amazed. I can say with full assurance that he changed my life forever. My mind, my spirit, my theology is all the better and more solid than ever before.

I can remember the bliss that filled me thinking about the great movement I was a part of.  Not in any prideful way but a sincere love and devotion to the path that was laid out before us by God. I mean it seemed so great and perfectly fit! Overwhelmingly blessed beyond measure.  But we slowly became a threat to the status quo and system of the day.  The gazing eyes of the lack of respect was stinging. Not realizing that we were not the enemy!  Many times we would have to leave abruptly after meetings because people did not ‘agree’ with him as he laid out the spiritual plan.  Many of those ‘spiritual leaders’ would have him come and hold meetings only to use his gift and difference to add monetary blessings to their own work. You see I have seen him so many times be tolerated and not celebrated.  I know most people don’t know this but many of those with gifts of the spirit can easily get prostituted for that gift!  I know many don’t want to think of this, but said leaders have many times brought people into their congregations to do one of several things:

1. Bring a stirring and commitment beyond the normal realm of commitment. (revival spirit)
2. To confirm, affirm, the current leaderships path
3. To create buzz about the mission of the church, and fund projects

You can see where this man clearly would and could not be a good candidate for some of these.

He is the simple man and woman’s guide; and every religious leaders nightmare.  You see when he speaks I could see the simple people freed into the presence, and the religious blinded.  Even by the same teachings, it would sear the heart of the religious and harden, and free and feed the hungry and called at the very same time!

Often imitated,
many times hated
never celebrated….

Mar Enoch Ashe
Beloved

Divine Purpose

3 Gifts of Spiritual Guides

(From Bishop Kalistos Ware)

Three gifts in particular distinguish the spiritual guide.

1. The first is insight and discernment (diakrisis), the ability to perceive intuitively the secrets of another’s heart, to understand the hidden depths of which the other does not speak and is usually unaware. The spiritual father or mother penetrates beneath the conventional gestures and subterfuges whereby we conceal our true personality from others and from ourselves;

Yet, for a word to possess power, it is necessary that there should be not only one who speaks with the genuine authority of personal experience, but also one who listens with attention and eagerness.

The elder’s gift of insight is exercised primarily through the practice known as the “disclosure of thoughts” (logismoi). In early Eastern monasticism the young monk used to go daily to his spiritual father and lay before him all the thoughts which had come to him during the day. This disclosure of thoughts includes far more than a confession of sins, since the novice also speaks of those ideas and impulses which may seem innocent to him, but in which the spiritual father may discern secret dangers or significant signs. Confession is retrospective, dealing with sins that have already occurred; the disclosure of thoughts, on the other hand, is prophylactic, for it lays bare our logismoi before they have led to sin and so deprives them of their power to harm. The purpose of the disclosure is not juridical, to secure absolution from guilt, but its aim is self-knowledge, that we may see ourselves as we truly are.

The principle underlying the disclosure of thoughts is clearly summed up in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: “If unclean thoughts trouble you, do not hide them but tell them at once to your spiritual father and condemn them. The more we conceal our thoughts, the more they multiply and gain strength… [But] once an evil thought is revealed, it is immediately dissipated… Whoever discloses his thoughts is quickly healed.”[3]

If we cannot or will not bring out into the open a logismos, a secret fantasy or fear or temptation, then it possesses power over us. But if with God’s help and with the assistance of our spiritual guide, we bring the thought out from the darkness into the light, its influence begins to wither away. Having exposed the logismos, we are then in a position to deal with it, and the process of healing can begin. The method proposed here by the early monks has interesting similarities with the techniques of modern psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But the early monks had worked out this method fifteen centuries before Freud and Jung! There is, of course, an important difference: the early monks did not employ the notion of the unconscious in the way that modern psychology does, even though they recognized that with our conscious understanding we are usually aware of only a small part of ourselves.

2. The second gift of the spiritual father or mother is the ability to love others and to make others’ sufferings their own. Of one elder mentioned in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, it is briefly and simply recorded: “He possessed love, and many came to him.”[6] He possessed love — this is indispensable in all spiritual motherhood and fatherhood. Insight into the secrets of people’s hearts, if devoid of loving compassion, would not be creative but destructive; if we cannot love others, we will have little power to heal them.

Loving others involves suffering with and for them; such is the literal sense of the word “compassion.” “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2): the spiritual father or mother is the one par excellence who bears the burdens of others.

Yet the relation between the spiritual father and his children is not one-sided. Though he takes the burden of their guilt upon himself and answers for them before God, he cannot do this effectively unless they themselves are struggling wholeheartedly on their own behalf. Once a brother came to St Antony of Egypt and said: “Pray for me.” But the old man replied: “Neither will I take pity on you nor will God, unless you make some effort of your own.”[11]

3. A third gift of the spiritual father and mother is the power to transform the human environment, both the material and the non-material. The gift of healing, possessed by so many of the startsi, is one aspect of this power. More generally, the starets helps his disciples to perceive the world as God created it and as God desires it once more to be. The true elder is one who discerns the universal presence of the Creator throughout creation, and assists others to discern it likewise. He brings to pass,

The lack of spiritual fathering and mothering is eroding our culture…