“Mt. Mary and the Laundromat “

There is no substitute for learning to hear and walk by God’s voice.

Our emotions can play tricks with us. Feelings are fleeting. Making important decisions by them can shipwreck us. God has given us intellect, but intellect without Him can be deadly. Smartness without the Holy Spirits begets arrogance.

Our country is facing a crisis of sin, a God crisis, because we have, by intellectual arrogance,  rejected Him. Much of our government has become Christo phobic or Theo phobic.  Theos is the Greek word for God.

The devil can interject thoughts into our minds but not into our spirits. So we must be led in by the voice of God in our spirits.

The only sure thing is the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit speaking through His Word.  Only the Holy Spirit knows the beginning from the end.

Christ is the head and not us.  We are His body. A body cannot see or hear. It is guided by the head. A head holds the brain, which can think. It holds the eyes that can see in to the future. A head holds the ears which can pay attention to every circumstance which comes.

When we are guided by the voice of God, we are guided by the head. Our country has chosen in its self-sufficiency to reject the Head, and now it’s blind. It is literally a chicken with its head cut off. Until America  finds the value of having its head which is Christ, spiritually sown back unto its body, it will continue to dance blindly.

If you are serious about being led by the Head, who is Christ, God will teach you.

Many tell me that they cannot hear God’s voice. Let me assure you that God speaks twenty four seven.  He is speaking but we don’t recognize Him. We have not learned that He speaks by gut feeling knowledge  coupled with an Amen or a lack thereof in our conscience. If you as a Christian are guided by your heart and  conscience you will have a good grasp on the voice of God.

If you are interested in learning to recognize His voice and be led by it, be prepared for God in His love, to begin to remove  and introduce things  that will help you recognize that voice.

Our family went through a season of protracted poverty which God placed us in. There are some who will tell you, that poverty is not of God, and if you are a child of the Most High, you are only to be blessed and not to suffer.

As I look back at my 33 years with God, I can say that I have been blessed every day of my life. But that blessing has not always been in the form of material stuff.

God will sacrifice the material to birth the spiritual.

As I wrote yesterday, God had me in celibacy for nine years to prepare me for the wife of my dreams. During that time God really cleaned me up.

God stripped us of material possessions and placed us in difficult positions where we had to learn to depend upon Him and not money.

During our first years in New Mexico, we were very poor and were brushed by poverty.  It was when we had nothing that God not only taught us to live by His voice, but taught us to trust Him, by revealing His faithfulness.

We were living in a tiny duplex with our Native American friend  inhabiting the other part of the duplex.

Our kids were two, four, six and eight. There were no washing machines in the duplex.

The closest laundry mat was in the Cochiti Pueblo Indian Nation about 5 miles away. At this time I was not working. We had no money, and no church support. We were living in a Catholic community in New Mexico by the name of Pena Blanca.

We had no money as well to do laundry. The bedroom of our duplex was used as our storage. Our family slept on beds and couches in the living room. My office was the tiny water heater room.

As we wore our clothes we kept on dumping them into a pile in our bedroom. I jokingly called the voluminous heap of clothes, “Mt. Mary”, after my wife’s name.

The peak of dirty laundry grew bigger and bigger.  LOL, it was almost as tall as us.

Many a time our Indian neighbor’s girls would come to play with our kids. One day the mother offered us $20.00 for babysitting them. We did not want to take the money but saw it as God’s provision to finally get our laundry done.

Excitedly we loaded our van with nineteen, yes, nineteen loads of laundry in garbage bags and proceeded to our church in Santa Fé. Our plans were to go to church and then go to a laundry mat in Santa Fé.

It’s incredible, when you have nothing how grateful you become at the notion of clean laundry.

Into the sanctuary the six of us filed sitting just a few rows back from the preacher.

As the sermon was delivered, God whispers into my ear, “Leave!”

I was startled by God’s command. “What God?”

“Leave”, came His voice again.

I was dumbfounded. How could God tell me to walk out with a family of six in the middle of the preacher’s sermon. On top of that we were so close to him. This would be the rudest thing I could ever do.

I argued with God. “But Lord, do you realize what a humiliating and rude thing it is to walk out with four kids? “

“Leave”, came the voice again.

“ But God, I can’t do that.”

“ Leave, I say.” God spoke again.

Who knows that you can’t argue with God?  When it’s Him, He is the most stubborn being in the Universe.

Cowering in humiliation, heads looking at the floor, the six of us proceeded out of the sanctuary and into the lobby.

We were met by a man whom I had only seen a few times before. He pointed to my oldest daughter who was nine and said, “ Come here little girl.”

You can imagine me, a father,  witnessing another grown man beckoning my nine year old daughter to come to him. I was like an eagle ready to swoop down on its prey if any dirty stuff emerged.

I told my daughter to go to him. The man  proceeded to give her a $20.00 bill.  All of a sudden we had $40.00 for laundry. Would you know that it cost us $39.75 to do our nineteen loads?

Here it’s a case of God taking away the material to teach us to live by the spiritual, to live by His voice. If I would have been rich, God could have not proved Himself and I would not have a chance to recount to you the wonderful story of “Mt. Mary and the Laundromat.”