Laying Down Expectations

Since most of the more than 50 people who were attending the Reunion had never met, we began the session introducing ourselves.  It was exciting to see people gathered from all over the province – from McLennan and Grande Prairie, right down to Brooks, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge – and many points in between!   

As we sought the Lord before the Reunion we sensed that He wanted our very first act together to be to lay down/offer to the Lord all of our expectations about what would happen during these days, so that we could prepare a place for the Holy Spirit to move with complete freedom.  In the months preceding the Reunion, there had been many visions, dreams and other revelation being released as we fasted and prayed.  The danger of such revelation, however, is that, without being aware, we can start to form expectations of what and how things will happen.  Rick shared a great analogy of how the prophetic is like a historical murial.  In a murial, all of the significant events of a community or people group are compressed into one representative picture.   If you look at that picture and assume that everything took place at the same time, you would have a wrong interpretation.    And so it is with the prophetic.  Sometimes God shows us things all together, but in reality some things are for now, and some are for later.  And we don’t always know which is which.  That’s why we need to be willing to offer back to the Lord even the things He reveals to us and give Him the right and freedom to fulfill His purposes in the way and the timing that He desires.  

So we felt to take a time of worship, during which we could ask the Lord to highlight to us any expecations we had that He wanted us to lay down.  Even in the area of the worhip, the Lord wanted to deal with our expectations.  Tabitha Lemaire, a worship leaders from Montreal who has been intimately involved in every step of the journey - including traveing and leading worship during the Awaken Tour -  was supposed to be leading worship.  And yet the Lord directed us to use a specific prophetic worship CD about surrender.  So we obeyed and entered into worship.  As the Lord would bring to our minds an expectation we might have, we wrote it down on a slip of paper and placed it on a map of Alberta at the front of the room.   When the worship was completed, 4 people from 4 corners of the province each took hold of an end of the map and raised it to heaven as Rick led us in a prayer of releasing our expectations..  Together we declared that there is a company of believers in Alberta willing to give the Lord the full freedom to move in whatever way pleases Him.