God said, "Are You Willing?"
Learning to say "yes" to God, even when it's not the path you expected
In the fall of 2008, my wife and I were planning to move to the mountains of western North Carolina. We had been married for less than a year, but we were eager to leave our hometown of Greenville, North Carolina. However, I was about to have a 3:00 am encounter with God that would change everything.
An Insane First Year Of Marriage
My wife, Shepard, and I got married at the end of 2007, and I had quit my job a few months earlier to raise support to do a full-time prayer and worship ministry. This would have been challenging under any circumstances, but raising support during the 2008 financial crisis and my first year of marriage wasn’t the ideal scenario. We were basically broke.
On top of that, we were healing up from a painful experience of spiritual abuse. Right before we got married, we joined a charismatic church out in the country with a pastor who was enthusiastic about the idea of 24/7 prayer. He had planned for January 2008 to be a month of 24/7 prayer at their church. We got married and dove in headfirst. After a month of 24/7, people wanted to continue, and the pastor quickly put me in charge of the prayer room. My wife and I also started leading worship at the church. We had no history with this church or pastor, but we had no reservations. Some of our friends accompanied us as well. There was a fresh wave of young adults who were bringing a lot of excitement. We felt like God was fulfilling our dreams. Marriage. Full-time ministry. 24-7 prayer. Worship.
However, within a few months, we began to experience some of what I would later understand to be spiritual abuse. The senior leader had no accountability, no team, and no outside oversight. He became increasingly controlling and manipulative. Anyone who pushed back was called “Jezebel”. Our last Sunday there included the pastor passively aggressively “correcting” my wife from the pulpit (not by name, of course). It took longer than it should have, but after about 10 months, we got out. Their 24-7 prayer schedule ended soon after. Some of the young adults who had followed us there were deeply disillusioned, and some no longer follow Jesus.
Meanwhile, our own ministry (6:22 Ministries) was experiencing some notable successes. Our worship band had toured eastern North Carolina for eight months, hosting worship nights for students and rallying them to a 24-hour worship gathering at the Greenville Convention Center, called Worshipfest, on August 8, 2008 (08-08-08). Over 1,000 people showed up. Following Worshipfest, we wanted to take the 6:22 band on the road and expand our ministry beyond eastern North Carolina. However, most of our team decided to move on to other things after Worshipfest.
We had hosted our biggest event ever. We were a part of 24/7 prayer. We were doing full-time ministry. Our band had recorded some of our songs and was ready to expand our reach. Then everything crumbled. No church. No band. No money. And all the other unique challenges that come with your first year of marriage.
This is when we decided to move to Black Mountain, NC. We loved the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. We were young adults ready to leave our hometown and escape the pain of the previous year. But God….
The 3 am Encounter
That fall, I woke up one night around 3 am with a distinct sense that I needed to pray and be with God. (I am not the “God woke me up at 3 am” guy, by the way. This has only happened to me once.) I went into our living room and soon felt the weighty glory of God in the room with me. I didn’t know what to do other than lie on the floor with my eyes closed. This was the most intense sense of the “fear of God” that I’d ever felt. It was the kind of manifestation of the presence of God that led Isaiah to say, “Woe is me!”. I felt as if I stood up and opened my eyes that I might literally die.
Under this weighty and unique glory, I heard God thunder in my heart:
“Are you willing?”
It was like the question reverberating inside my chest. As soon as I heard the Lord speak, the story of the prophetess Anna from Luke 2 came to my mind. This story was fresh on my mind because I had recently heard a teaching about the “Anna calling” - how some people are called to serve God with prayer as their primary vocation.
While still on the floor, I also had a vision of my wife and me sitting on a park bench at the Town Common in downtown Greenville, NC. We were very old, and revival was breaking out all around us. We sat peacefully on the bench, unnoticed, as crowds of people sang songs of praise, danced, prayed for one another, and boldly preached the Gospel.
I knew God was inviting me to the vocation of prayer, like Anna, but in Greenville and eastern North Carolina. I knew it was an invitation to the hidden ministry of intercession, prayer, and fasting. I knew it was an invitation to partner with God in seeing revival released in our region, but without getting any of the credit.
Eventually, the weighty sense of God’s glory lifted, and I went back to bed - without yet answering God’s question. I talked to Shepard the next day, and we knew what we had to do. We really wanted to go to the mountains, but we had to say yes. After a few days, I finally surrendered. We stayed in Greenville.
Less than a year after this encounter, God supernaturally launched the Boiler Room (which I wrote about in chapter 7 of David’s Tabernacle), a house of prayer we pioneered, which lasted from 2009 to 2016. In 2016, God very clearly released me from this assignment, and our family moved to Durham, NC, for three years. When we moved back home in 2020, things were different - not only because of the global pandemic, but also because it marked a new season of ministry. When we returned home, I was working for Awaken the Dawn and Opendoor Church, and that’s where God had my ministry focused for a few years.
A Re-Commissioning
Things started shifting in early 2023. In March of that year, God reminded me of a prophetic dream I had exactly ten years prior, in 2013, about revival in eastern North Carolina. I felt a release to begin to dream with God about ministry beyond Awaken the Dawn and Opendoor. I started dreaming about region-wide revival and 24/7 prayer again. I knew God was inviting me into a fresh assignment and a new season for my ministry. Unexpectedly, this was followed by a deeply challenging year in 2023, marked by the death of my father and the Mike Bickle scandal at IHOPKC.
In January 2024, I was recovering from the previous year. During a time of prayer, I heard God speak to me again:
“Are you willing?”
It wasn’t as dramatic as the first time, but it didn’t have to be. It carried the weight of the original encounter along with the stirring of the new season. I knew God was re-commissioning me to day and night prayer in eastern North Carolina. I knew it was another invitation to give myself to an “Anna calling” of long hours of prayer, rhythms of fasting, and ministry to the Lord as my primary vocation. I knew it was a call to re-engage in the region to pursue united 24/7 prayer and worship that would “awake” ENC.
What I didn’t know was that Opendoor Church, where I was working part-time, would close its prayer room a few months later. And the day after their prayer room closed, God gave me the DNA for what is now The Greenhouse. The vision was already stirring in our hearts, but on that day, He said, “prayer room, classroom, living room.” This launched us into our new pioneering journey, which we have been navigating for the last year or so. We officially launched the Greenhouse on New Year’s 2024, and we’re now (re)building a day and night prayer room here in our hometown.
The first year of The Greenhouse has been WILD! Pioneering in your forties is very different from pioneering in your twenties. But we still believe God wants a place for the “Annas” (men and women) of eastern North Carolina to come and minister to the Lord with extravagant worship, prayer, and fasting. The vision for The Greenhouse is to be a place of His presence, where the Church is equipped and a spiritual family is cultivated. In other words, that we would be a prayer room, a classroom, and a living room.
He’s given us this assignment. What is His assignment for you? Are you willing?
As I’m planning my future monthly articles for Presence Pioneers Media, I hope to share more of our journey of pioneering The Greenhouse, including some of our struggles, breakthroughs, and what it takes behind the scenes to build a prayer room. Stay tuned!
Thank you for sharing. 🙏