Michele Perry - Sudan

15/January/2007 04:12 Filed in: Updates from HG students

Salaam Taki en isim be tai Jesua: Peace in the name of Jesus from Sudan to my Holy-Given family… who could have fathomed the extravagant love of our Jesus poured out here to raise up a generation of His Presence out of the ashes of war. So much has happened in the last 2 weeks since Christmas. We fed right at a 1000 at Christmas as we opened our big blue gate and said “Jesus is calling you to eat!” Since then our little family of 8 has grown to somewhere around 35 but I need to count them all to make sure. Numbers and details… well they just aren’t my forte… all I know is real LIFE in the dirt here is happening everyday.

Many of you know I have been in a battle with falcipiron malaria for almost a month. It came and kind of went and came and maybe left and we just don’t know. I leave tomorrow pick up Melissa McKinney from HG2 in Entebbe and will see a western doc there for tests. I have had one infection after another since arriving here and it has taken its toll on my body. And typing this to you a YWAM team of 10 from America just turned up in the internet café wanting to know if there was something they could do with us in the next week. WOW God. So they are going to running a camp for our kids and the neighborhood kids too… Jesus is treating both me to a little breather and them to camp! How awesome is that.

I am admittedly a type A personality who loves to be busy busy and have 10 plates twirling at all times. Jesus has decided to use the enemy’s little attempts as experiences to teach me about reveling in His strength in my weakness. I am learning. I mean I have barely the energy to get out of bed most mornings but His grace is enough. More has been accomplished here in 3 weeks and I just don’t know how any of it has happened really. I really don’t. And I know healing is coming… it is already here in Him but right now it is a now and not yet mystery in my body at the moment.

Can I just be plain honest with you? I would be out preaching my heart out here—doing outreaches all the time—going going going, doing doing doing if I had anything to say about my life here. The needs are enormous and the situation at times urgent. I have prayed for every sick person I have found since setting foot on this soil. But I have not seen any one healed- YET. I have seen many give their hearts to Jesus though. I have prayed for the blind and the deaf and the crippled and nothing visible has changed but hey they know they are loved. Ok we have only been here 3 months. But it isn’t like Pemba YET… It will never be Pemba, but it will be Yei. It will be revival poured out and uniquely expressed here in Sudan. OK so I would be preaching my heart out but at times I walk leaning on walls and it isn’t a manifestation. It took me a whole day to buy a table. I mean hello. I like fast, expedient and so God sends me to perhaps the slowest place on the planet. I have not seen revival here as we know it or saw it in Mozambique. Not yet. But I am learning the depths of my own weakness and inability and if I preached my heart out and prayed and prophesied and did all the same stuff we saw done in Mozambique I can’t make revival happen. Relief. What if we could? Then it would look like us, eh?

Pemba is supernatural—no amount of effort could do what is being done there by Jesus. Yei will be supernatural too. But Jesus has been speaking loud and clear… my job isn’t to heal or to bring revival. That’s His job. My job is to love Him. It’s a love story, not a case study in revival He is after. We are called to dance with Him through the darkness until daybreak, until our hearts become so fused together His light is all they see. We are called to live a romance beyond reason, a love beyond limit. I’ll confess I began to wonder if there was some place in the world I could go to a conference and get zapped. Please zap me God—where’s MY Toronto? My kids decided on their own (we’ve only had them 2 weeks too!) they are going to pray for me every night until I am healed. Can we say undone? They push REALLY hard… I might get healed from malaria but then they are going to have to pray for my neck! Hah! Last night Jesus walked up to me in the middle of all my kids and said, “You’re looking for a place: I’m offering an embrace. Wanna dance?”

Could it be Jesus is so after the heart of His Bride He wants her to carry the revival that is found by living a life surrendered to His embrace? Not so much caught from a conference or a famous outpouring site but captured in a dance… (ok I love conferences and will go anywhere God is moving for more). I don’t know how revival will come here. I don’t even know what it will look like in Sudanese skin. I don’t even know how to make my kids use the latrines properly yet. I am ready to run into revival and Jesus is saying first I must learn rest. That REST is foundational to revival. And rest has always been the one thing I find most elusive and the one thing I need more revelation on that just about anything. So keep praying for me, k?

Meet our youngest (see above) at 3 weeks old. His mom went insane and abandoned him. And he is a little prophetic message from heaven. When the uncle went to get him before I knew his name I asked Jesus what his name was—immediately Immanuel came as the reply. When his family returned with him to make introductions, guess what, his name is indeed Immanuel. Now everyone and their cousin is named that here BUT this little guy is special. He was brought to us at a time I so need to know God with us. This is our baby—he will grow with us and to me always, always for as long as we have him remind me how a work of God’s Spirit grows as well.

So I asked Jesus how long is this dancing in the darkness, waiting, rebuilding the altar at the entry way of Your habitation season gonna be? Wait until June. So we are in a season of waiting on Him and pressing our ear to heaven and hiding deeper in His heart. Now we are still proceeding with some basic stuff—30+ kids, small and the operative word is SMALL primary school, CONVERGE: School of Supernatural Ministry and Indigenous Leadership where the first two months is going to based in extended worship and waiting and some teaching as the Lord leads of course too, a little local outreach and work with the SPLA and what not… but we are going to save saving the nation tomorrow for Jesus to do and just learn to be family and grow up together. I am going to play soccer with my boys—they’re good too. I am going to play with my kids and sing songs to Jesus and enjoy their little precious moments.

Surrounded by them crawling into my lap and calling mama—can I say I love my life, even when it has its moments. But doesn’t everything? The Lord latest revelation of what rest means… “When the work becomes as simple as bearing fruit… fruit can’t be forced. Mangos only grow in mango season and if it isn’t mango season then enjoy papayas instead. That’s rest.”

So I pray this finds all of you enjoying the fruit that only comes from intimacy in whatever season you are in. For me it is a season of learning to be five years old, learning to eat mangos and papayas, learning to dance in the dark and sing in the silence, learning to be and be loved and be His first, last and always… a season of embrace, leaning into His limitless love with uncompromising surrender. Revival isn’t our goal. HE is our goal.

I love you guys and love hearing your latest. Please email me as my connection is not so good for web browsing here. But I love email. And you are all invited to come live love and learn with us where heaven is going to meet earth—for a visit or if God calls to consider even longer. My email is songsofthebride@yahoo.com if you want to say hi or drop in. And as always I cherish your prayers and couldn’t be doing what I am without them. Only heaven knows how many times you have had parts to play in saving my life and my sanity! I love you dearly global tribe of laid down lovers moving with the Lamb until the whole earth is filled with His glory in a generation of passion and presence and the sounds of heaven drown out the sounds of earth.

Love in Jesus
-Michele