Angelic Encounters

There has been a lot going on in my life that I haven't shared on my testimony page. Some of it has gone into a teaching series on the prophetic-school called "Ask Teresa." More of it has gone into a book that I recently wrote, titled "Mercy In Judgment."

God has been doing such amazing things that I wanted to give you a short synopsis. (Some if it is overview and some of it is details of Heavenly encounters.)

CATCH-UP ON WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING WITH ME:

I had a missions trip to Asia in September of 2002, where I went to Hong Kong and in to mainland China. God did amazing things on that trip, so it is not surprising that there was a lot of spiritual warfare when I came home from it. My health began to suffer and I began started to get tired and discouraged. Somewhere in there I ended up in a desert experience where God felt far away.

I knew, in my head that He was not far away, and I continued to have some amazing visions and experiences with Him. But in day-to-day life, He started to "feel" far away and I started to feel very dry. I still loved God very much and I did not backslide at all, but I was not living in that sense of His presence and intimacy that I was used to.

In late November or early December, Jim Paul (a friend of mine who also mentors me from time to time) told me that he was having angelic visitations in his home. He lived in Ontario, Canada. That is a long way from San Francisco. It is about a six hour flight if you get a direct, non-stop flight, and about 2-3 hours longer if you have a layover. In other words, it is far enough away that you don't just drop by to drop by. But when I heard that angels were showing up on a daily basis at my friend's house, I longed to go there to encounter God. I felt "dry" and I was very hungry for God. I teasingly told him that I was half-tempted to fly out and camp out in his living room and pursue God. I did not seriously mean it when I said it, but Jim took it seriously. He invited me to come and stay with them. I said I'd pray about it, not really expecting to take him up on the offer.

But when I prayed, my hunger for God increased even more. I knew I had to go, so we made arrangements. The schedule worked out so that I could not go on this pilgrimage to until mid-January. I was a bit concerned that the angels would stop showing up by then. I called Jim about a week before the trip and asked him about it. My fears had been realized: the angels were not showing up on a daily basis any more. In fact, it had been a few weeks since Jim had seen one. But he thought I should still come anyhow, as there was a conference at TACF that he felt God wanted me to attend. Monday night was a special meeting just for the local pastors, and Jim invited me to it with him. It was sort of humorous, because the main speaker was Bill Johnson (from California, my state) who I am already in relationship with. (I attend a semiannual leaders conference at Bill's church and I am part of a group of leaders who are in relationship with him and look to him for inspiration and guidance.)

I ended up going to Canada to visit my friend and his wife (also a friend of mine.) I spent hours each day sitting and praying in the room where the angels had been meeting Jim every day. I really longed for an angelic encounter. God had been speaking a lot of stuff to me over the past year, and I wanted to have a face-to-face with an angel and have that angel tell me basically the same stuff. I felt that would be a validation of my hearing, and I was very hungry for that.

The Lord did meet and refresh me wonderfully on that trip, but I never saw a single angel. Here is a funny part--one afternoon while I was praying in the living room, Jim was upstairs in his bedroom reading a book. His bedroom is directly above the room I was praying in. I was asking God to send an angel to speak to me. Right them, two angels showed up in Jim's room and began speaking to Jim--about me! When he told me that, I was miffed. It was like they missed and went to the wrong room--only God never misses. He wanted me to focus all my searching and desire on Him, not on His servants.

God met me on that trip the way He always meets me, and He spoke to me the way He always speaks to me. But my spirit was revived in His presence, and God restored my sense of destiny and calling. I felt like a sponge that had been bone dry, and the Lord saturated me with His living water during the trip, so I wasn't dry any more. God did not meet me the way I expected Him to, but He did meet me and I was very satisfied.

I came home and had a crisis to deal with. It did not take long to get "back under it all" and loose the sense of refreshment I experienced in Canada. I cried out to God for help and all He said was "Trust Me." (I hate it when God says that, because I am not as good at trusting Him as I need to be.)

Over the next two months, I started to feel very dry again. I decided that the only thing I could do was to saturate myself in His word and cry out to Him for help. I had a week where I spent about an hour or two a day reading the bible and another hour praying and crying out to God. God would meet me in the prayer time, and He even caught me into a few visions of Heaven. But when I wasn't in that prayer time, I still felt very dry and worn out, and I began to mentally prepare myself for another long "desert experience."

THE ANGELIC ENCOUNTERS BEGIN

It was mid-march and about a week into the intense bible reading. An angel suddenly showed up in my room as I was reading God's word. The angel began to speak to me and I could feel God's strong presence radiating from him. I knew that angel had to be from God, because he carried such a strong measure of God's presence. This was not a demonic "angel of light" -- this was the "real thing."

The angel began to instruct me. He showed up frequently, two or three times a day for about an hour or so at a time. It was wonderful and I felt myself coming alive in the Lord. The angel told me his name and I tried to ask him questions about what it was like being an angel. Mostly he did not walk to talk about himself, he just wanted to talk about God. He would ask me a lot of open-ended questions that were designed to get me thinking about some aspect of God's character or faithfulness, etc. I found that as I pondered his questions, I could not help it, I would start worshipping God and get lost in worship. The angel taught me a lot about God's character and I was caught up into God's presence and into several open visions of being before God's throne. It was an incredible experience. The angel instructed me to put many of my experiences into a fictional story that God had told me to write. (If you want to read that story, the book is titled Mercy In Judgment and you can find out more about it at www.lulu.com/godspeak-intl)

About a week or so later, I met a second angel who also began to spend a lot of time with me, and I saw less of the first angel. The first angel had been a worship and intimacy angel, and his task seemed to be to help me move into higher levels of worship and intimacy with God.

The second angel was a judgment angel. He said that God has sent him to mentor me for a season, and it was a time of incredible growth for me. At first the angel seemed very jolly--he laughed a lot and had a wonderful sense of humor. But he could also get very serious and purposeful. The mentoring that he did with me did not go the way I expected it to go. I think I expected to learn divine secrets that would show me how to move more in God's power and anointing. But this angel focused more on my blind spots and character growth. He showed me areas of myself that I did not want to look at because I did not want to admit that I had them. He would instruct me to go to God and deal with the issue with the Lord.

One time I had a "fight" with this angel over an area of my woundedness that he wanted me to embrace and put under God's lordship. I did not want to admit that I had this problem and I was stubborn. I tried to get the angel off of this topic and onto something else, but he would not leave his agenda. (At that time I did not realize it was God's agenda and something that I had no option of avoiding.) The angel insisted that I deal with this and I refused.

He did not do anything to threaten me or to hurt me, he simply left. When he left, the sense of God's nearness also went away. (I had been living in a very tangible sense of God's presence since the angels had started to visit me, and it was almost unbearable for this to go away.) I had this horrible three-day period where the Heaven's seemed like brass.

I figured that I'd blown it and shut down the whole process, and I was very upset with myself for doing that. I finally decided that I was going to embrace and deal with this character issue--even if the process of being mentored by angels was over, I was still going to bring this area of my character to the Lord and deal with it with Him. At first the prayer time was awkward, but God managed to meet me and get me through it. Once I prayed this through, I experienced a tangible sense of healing from the Lord. Next, I started mentally lamenting the fact that I'd shut down my angelic mentoring. I realized that my stubbornness and grieved God's heart and I apologized to him about it.

Suddenly my room filled with light. I was not sure what was happening. Was God catching me into another vision?

"Teresa," a voice called to me form out of the light. I recognized the voice. It was the angel who had been mentoring me.

"I am so glad that you came back! I am sorry that I was so stubborn and difficult and I will try to do better."

"You must do better, it is not an option."

I did not say anything but I had a question mark in my spirit. Angels can read our thoughts as easily as they can hear our spoken words. He knew I did not understand and he went on to explain.

"Don't you know that when an angel speaks to you, he is sent by God and is representing God to you. I don't come with my own message or agenda; I come with God's. When you disobey me, you are actually disobeying God."

I knew he was rebuking me and I knew I deserved it. I knew that I owed him an apology before he even began to speak to me. But when I heard that I was disobeying/fighting God, I felt pierced to the heart. I had to stop right then and repent to the Lord.

The angel waited for me to finish before he went on. He told me that he knew it was hard for me, but it was important that I cooperate with God, because God was offering me something I really did not want to pass on. But in order to get what God wanted to give me, I had to let Him work in me to transform my character. God had been trying to work on some of these areas for some time, directly and personally with me. But I was in denial and shut the door to Him in some areas. That is why He had found it necessary to send the angel to work with me, because I would not cooperate with the Holy Spirit working in me in this area. When he said these things, I knew it was true. I felt so bad that I started to cry.

The angel let me cry for a while, then he collected me into his arms and gave me a hug. I felt the love and acceptance of God pouring over me, and I was saturated in His peace. I realized that he wasn't mad at me about my resisting him earlier, and that I could trust him to faithfully represent God to me. I made a mental decision that I would do my best to cooperate both with God and with His angel.

After I had collected myself and was in a place of peace, the angel asked me if I would like him to tell me a story, and I said yes.

We were in the guest bedroom, which doubles as my prayer closet. He sat on the bed with his back pressed against the headboard and his legs stretched out on the length of the bed. He invited me to sit next to him. Before I knew it, I was curled up on the bed with my head in his lap, much the way a small child sleeps on the sofa with their head in their parent's lap. He put one hand on my back and then covered me with one of his wings. I felt so safe at that moment and the love of God washed over me. Even if he hadn't said a word, that would have been an incredible experience for me.

Then he began to tell me a story about an angel. "Teresa, as you know, we angels are now fixed in our relationship with God. We all love Him and we all continue to grow in him, but the growth is now at a fixed rate. Our order in Heaven is fixed and cannot change. We have been ranked relative to each other and that ranking can never change. And we are perfected in the Lord, so that we all love and respect each other, regardless of our rank."

"But there was a time when we were not fixed in our rank. We each had duties to perform and decisions to make, but there was flux and fluidity in our individual relationships with the Lord. There was an angel who was very hungry for God. He sought and pursued God more than most of his peers, and he grew closer to God because of that . When the time came for us to be fixed in our relationship with God and in our rankings relative to each other, this angel was given a relatively high rank because of his hunger for God during the time when things were fluid."

"You're talking about yourself, aren't you?" I asked. Angels hardly ever talk about themselves, so this story really caught my interest. I realized that this angel must be a high-ranking (important) angel and I wondered why God had sent him into my life. I did not feel like I merited an angel at all, much less a high-ranking one.

"Yes, I am talking about myself. But there is a reason why I am telling you this story."

"I'm listening."

"Teresa, you and all of the people living on this earth are still in your fluid stage. You haven't yet be fixed in rank and in your relative relationship with God. I want you to go as high in God as you can now, while you are still fluid in your ability to grow. The point that you reach before you die will be your launching point for all of eternity. In eternity, you will still grow and God will continue to reveal more of Himself to you, but your rate of growth will become fixed. The higher point you start at, the more you can get to know Him in eternity."

Then he went on to explain that there are basically five categories that we can end up in, based on our hunger/passion for God and also based on how long we have know and served Him. Each of the five categories will have it's own rate of growth in knowing God in eternity. The angel encouraged me to press to get in as high of a group as I could while I lived on this earth, so that I could have a faster rate of growth in God revealing Himself to me in eternity. The hungrier I am for God now, and the more I submit to His will and obey Him, the more I will get to know Him in Heaven. (Of course, that is true for all of us, not just for me.)

The angel's story sparked something in me. I have been hungry for God for a long time, but now I am even more motivated to know Him better and walk in a greater measure of His lordship here on this earth. I don't know if it is possible for me to make it to group one (the group who grows the fastest in the Lord in eternity), since it contains the heroes of the faith like Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, John, Paul, etc. But I am going to do my best to get as close to God now so that He will reveal more of Himself to me more rapidly in eternity. What a wonderful prize to pursue--knowing Him better and being closer to Him!

When the story was over, it was back to the regular mentoring. I did more dieing to self than anything else. But I also learned more about God and about the ways of Heaven. The intense mentoring lasted six weeks and then it sort of tapered off. Angels are still coming and mentoring me, but not as frequently as before. It doesn't happen every day anymore, but I would say it still happens more than once a week.

You would think it would be impossible to feel dry with those type of experiences going on in your life. But there are 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is 168 hours a week. Maybe three or four of them are spent in mentoring and another 10 to 14 in intimacy prayer and devotions. That still leaves a lot of other hours in the week. As things slowed down, I began to feel a bit drier--not dry, but not as saturated in God's presence as I had been during the six weeks of intense mentoring. I start complaining to God about it and asking Him if I could live in His intense presence 24 hours a day, seven days a week. God said that I had to spend time in this life. If it was 24x7 lost in His presence and experiencing Him, then I would not be living my life here and He may as well take me to Heaven. However, He still has things for me to do here on earth, so I will have to wait a while to live continuously in that intense sense of His presence.

But He promised that He would continue to meet me powerfully from time to time, and to reveal more of Himself to me and let me experience more of His presence.