The Heart Takes Flight

Tomorrow, I leave for California to begin second year at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.

The first year was a grand adventure in every way, but especially the way of art + spirit.

Ten years ago, I wrote a dream list. Much of it has come true, albeit in ways I never imagined. A good example: To create a curriculum that blends arts and spirit, a course of study that is interdisciplinary beyond traditional, tangible media.

This spring, I created Eyes of the Heart, a workshop on prophetic arts which I have enjoyed sharing in churches this summer. It has been such a joy to see creativity ignited and used to bless others.

To celebrate this journey, I have created a limited-edition series, The heart takes flight. I kept it simple: hand-cut, pastel hearts on a 5” x 7” postcard like the three pictured above. The hearts have “broken” into birds and begun to take flight. The colors and exact nature of each heart vary—not unlike dreams.

A mixed set of three cards is $10, which includes domestic postage {add $3 for international}. Payment can be made:

• By check: c/o Albillo, 4322 Paulson Lane, Redding, CA 96002
• Online: through the Eyes of the Heart site (via the “donate” button at the bottom of the page)
• . . . and make sure to give me your mailing address
  

All proceeds from the sale of the cards will go toward arts in mission. Same for sales of my paintings this year. {My art is viewable at www.picasaweb.google.com/Annazonita.}

I love that dreams can take you places you never dreamed.

Dream big,

Anna Elkins

Psalm 85:10-11

Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven.

This is the eighth layer of painting that began with these verses charcoaled on a white canvas.

What does it look like for righteousness and peace to kiss? What is faithfulness rising?

The deep magenta became righteousness, beginning from above and entwining with green faithfulness rising from the earth. The white, whorled kiss is the start and the finish.

We meet again.

South Africa, 2010

Once I caught up on sleep, I finally sat down to write about the magnificent, activating, atmosphere-shifting trip to South Africa. That was last week. This is the umpteenth attempted format: sound bites. And since point of view has been on my mind as I consider a hefty revision of my long-dormant novel, think of the following in first-person plural. With 22 travelling companions, we managed an incredible unity. So, in one voice, here’s what we have to tell:

“She can see!” Eyes healed at a tent crusade, Hammanskraal Township outside of Pretoria

“She wants you to pray for her. She wants to know this Jesus.” A four-year old girl’s mother who translated for her daughter

“Lookout! He has a water gun!”
“No, that’s a Holy-water gun.”
“Get ready for baptism!” Water fight with Oasis Church members

“Hey! Who wants to speak only in tongues for an hour. Set your watches.” On the bus en route to Nelspruit

“Hey! Get off the roof. The canvas is ripping.”
“Yeah, that’s not in the budget.” Safari truck, Kruger National Park

“Look! Lions!”
And then: “Look! Lions . . . mating?”
“I think it’s a sign: our trip shall be fruitful.”
[After returning home] “Yeah, Facebook deleted those photos.” Kruger National Park

“You know how long this day was? This is the same day we went on safari.” After finishing a prayer tunnel at the end of a 15-hour day

“I like this word-of-knowledge thing.” When a word was called out for anyone with wrist pain, an athlete with wrist injuries was healed; he dropped and did 20 push-ups in front of the congregation

“That’s Pastor Surprise. He speaks a dozen languages that he received through divine impartation.” “Hmm. I’d like to learn Arabic that way. Cantonese, too.” New Covenant Church, Nelspruit

“Now that’s something to write on a postcard: ‘I just was just anointed by a man who’d been raised from the dead.’” New Covenant Church, Nelspruit

“Cappuccino! My clean socks for a cappuccino.” Most anytime

“So outreach went well. We went to KFC, and prayed for a guy with a limp. His leg was healed, and he started jumping up and down. The assistant manager and all the employees behind the counter came running over and asked us to pray for them. They wanted to know a God who heals.” KFC, Nelspruit

“We don’t have pit stops, we have healing-and-salvation stops.” After losing track of how many gas station attendants were saved/healed/delivered during our bus ride breaks

“I sat down next to a woman and started praying for her. When I asked if there was anything else I could do, she replied, ‘When you started praying, I had to read your lips. I was deaf. But now I can hear.” AIDS hospice, outskirts of East London

That’s just a taste, but it’s a sweet one. This adventure was beyond anything I could have planned or expected. And that’s just the way I’m starting to like it.

My sincerest gratitude to all of you who supported this trip with prayer and finances, anonymous and known. Blessings!

Open Hope

From The Dictionary of Anna’s Poetic License:

ex-pect-or-a’-mus. n. one who expects a certain outcome and thus limits his or her experience as a result of that preconceived expectation

Word in context:

Bethel students go out into the community to bless people with prayer, encounters, healing, etc. But if Anna just expects at most to bless someone with an encouraging word, presto. That’s about all she’ll do. She’ll get what she expected as an expectoramus.

If, on the other hand, Anna agrees with her outreach group that they will see a healing, she has begun to hope beyond her limitations, abilities, expectations.

And so her outreach group finds a man across from downtown Redding’s Salvation Army. He is walking with a cane because one of his legs is about nine inches shorter than the other.

Anna thinks: aha! That’s it! His leg will be healed. She doesn’t realize it, but she is still an expectoramus.

The group spends time talking with the man, Alex, getting to know him. He’s glad to accept prayer for his leg. But nothing happens. He’s just grateful for the company and this group of strangers taking time to bless him. As everyone shakes hands before leaving, he grips someone’s hand hard. “Hey, I do have pain in the back, man. Like all the time.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is it right now?” one of the group asks.

“Only one to ten? This here is fifteen. Been hurtin’ like mad. You all distracted me from the pain.”

So everyone begins to pray. The two people who have laid their hands on his spine begin to feel the vertebrae shifting. Everyone breaks into the same song at the same moment, though no one can remember it afterwards. All of a sudden, Alex breaks away, jumping up and down on his platform shoe. “It’s gone! The pain is gone!” He starts waving both of his hands over his head at the passing cars. “You missed this! You all MISSED this!”

Anna decides she doesn’t want to miss any blessings by being an expectoramus. She’s decided to choose open hope instead.

* * *

This and many other testimonies of healing come practically daily from the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. But Bethel doesn’t limit its outreaches to Redding, CA. Our mission trips go out all over the globe.

Thanks to the marvelous support of many of you reading this, my trip with Bethel International to South Africa this March is more than half-way paid for. Gratitude! I still have some to go, though. The final payment is due on the 24th of February.

If you haven’t heard about this trip or still want to participate, it would be an honor to have your financial partnership on this journey. You’ll be contributing to stories like the one above. Donations can still be made in my name at www.ibssm.org or by a check with my name in the memo/note line sent to: Bethel Church Missions, 933 College View Drive, Redding, CA 96003.

Here’s to believing beyond our expectations!

Kaleidoscope

There's the adage: “You can be right and dead wrong.” I am good at being right. So when I asked God how my rights might harm relationships, I immediately saw an intricate crystal castle. It fit in my hands. Imagine tiny facets, aligned crenelations, symmetrical turrets, the whole edifice an architectural perfection. And yet these “rights” were solidified and brittle. They were unmoved when anyone stood at their gates (gates which, though they swung open on smooth hinges, were too small for much to pass through).

With a sigh of resignation, I held the castle out to God: “Here, go ahead and smash it.” But instead of smashing it, He exploded it—and not in a way that it was destroyed, but that each crystal flew out of its rigid place and suspended in the air. The pieces spun and swirled, reflecting and refracting light. It was beautiful. Now they moved freely and could fit themselves to different circumstances.

It got better. The pieces started to come together. As they moved, they turned from clear to colored and solidified into the round viewfinder of a kaleidoscope. God smiled as he turned the handle, and I watched the equivalent of a stained glass window dancing. He said, “Here, go ahead and hold this instead.”

So now, instead of forcing people into my Castle of Rights, I shift the kaleidoscope. It’s amazing how different everyone looks in the colors of love.

When purpose is a verb

During college, I spent several holidays at a friend’s family farm on the Musselshell in Montana. On my first Thanksgiving there, Abby gave me the full tour. On the property stood an abandoned yellow farmhouse—the remains of a township that had tried to survive on the vast plains. She climbed the stoop and reached for the door knob, turning to me with a smile. “Would you like pillows?”

I followed her inside to find a house filled with goose feathers. With each of our steps, the topmost feathers lifted in welcome. Some wafted and shivered as if remembering wings. We began filling bags with the cloudy masses of white.

That afternoon, Abby made me a set of pillows on her mother’s sewing machine. That night, I slept on memories of flight. I’d like to think I had marvelous, sky-filled dreams on those pillows, but I can’t remember.

*

A feather’s purpose is to aid flight. All by themselves, feathers are useful bedding, ink pens, or headdresses. They need the wings to fly.

I think I’ve spent a fair amount of my life focused on the equivalent of feathers.

Of late, I hear people saying, “We purpose to . . .” and “I purpose to . . . .” Unlike some nouns-turned-verbs, this one doesn’t annoy me. I kind of like the combination of decide/choose/envision that “purpose” the verb condenses into one. To purpose you must have a purpose, a vision. And without vision—it was wisely written—we die.

Once, I wrote a poem that started: Yesterday the angel came, featherless. It’s one thing to know the difference between fluff and substance. It’s another to continually remind myself.

And so: I purpose to remember my vision. How’s that for multitasking?

Toward

Once

I once bicycled to an underground party held in the wee hours of the morning at a squat behind a German train station. Everyone was packed into a graffiti’d cellar dancing to a DJ who could make the very stones in the walls shake. All was dim except for a small disco ball that hung above us.

At one point while dancing, when the bass was bone-deep, I looked up at the sparkling ball. I had the oddest thought: God is watching.

That wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking, so I decided not to.

I decided not to during the two years I lived in Germany—during parties crafted by world-renowned DJs and VJs, dates with electro-acoustic composers, sushi dinners that turned into wig-wearing bowling games with very wobbly aim. During the day, I wrote poetry at a large, new-media arts center, and at night I looked for things to write about. It was all great fun, quite glossy, and largely empty of content. Which, interestingly, was a current issue with many of the art philosophers. Here you had technology that could “turn” the pages of a non-existent book or allowed you interact with words “raining” down walls when you cast your shadow across them. But in this technological/informational pipeline, what exactly was passing through?

During my second year there, the arts center hosted one of its many international festivals. One of the exhibits was, basically, about dust. When you walked into the large media theater, you saw several huge screens onto which were projected slow-motion video clips—a vacuum cleaner rolling over shag carpet, a woman shaking out a blanket, dust motes dancing in front of a window. Dust, dust, dust. In the middle of the room sat a man playing the banjo. He was singing an ode to dust.

I’m sure this was tongue-in-cheek—an acknowledgement of some of the ridiculousness occurring. Or at least, I hoped so. It won best of show. Dust won.


One

Ten years, several countries, and countless lessons later, I find myself in Redding, California at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.

The first day of class, I sat in a seat near the back. Behind me, two young guys who looked like they had a garage band were making video game sounds. Beep, beep. BOING. Dit, dit-dit-dit DOINK. People walking past them were falling down, drunk in the Holy Spirit. One of them gave her testimony after break, saying her neck had been healed when she walked by.

I had the most rational thought: this is weird. I’ve seen and encountered plenty of weird. But this kind was resulting in healings and joy.

When I taught literature to high school students on the Micronesian island of Saipan, I began the year with the Anglo-Saxon text of Beowulf. (That juxtaposition was a bit weird all by itself.) I explained to my seniors that the word “weird” stems from an Anglo-Saxon verb meaning “to become.” As a noun: wyrd. Unlike our contemporary version, which is slightly negative, wyrd was positive. It was linked to one’s destiny and meant “supernatural.” Wyrd is an ongoing, continual happening—“that which happens.”

So I didn’t leave the School of the Supernatural. In fact, on the third day, I knew I was meant to stay. During worship music, I looked out at over eight hundred people, most of them dancing . . . in a church. The Spirit presence lay so strong in the room, your limbs tingled with it. God was not only watching, He was there.

I remembered the cellar party, the dust exhibit. Anymore, I’d rather dance in the direction of love and hope. I’d rather find gold dust on my hands during praise. It’s happening.

I am becoming. Wyrd, indeed.