7. Writing My Story

© Daniel Yordy – 2020

Writing my life story is becoming an extraordinary experience, beyond extraordinary.  

I have hardly ever mentioned my time at Bowens Mill. Always before, if I was forced to look across those years, I saw only a dark hole of confusion and pain, yet they were memories that, by the grace of God, held no immediate hold over me.

After completing the third chapter on those years, I now look across them and see nothing but goodness and purpose. I never expected this profound transformation.

In this letter I hope to attempt an explanation of what is happening and why.

I ended the last letter with this statement. – God summons us into Himself – because Jesus said, “I went them here with Me” –, that we might summon God into His creation – because we say, “We want YOU here with us.” Why do I say, “Father, You are here with me, part of me, sharing these awful feelings with me for the sake of Your people” most all the time? Because it’s what I want. I want a life of Father with me, therefore, I call Him to be so. –

I want Jesus to be with me inside of every moment of my life, therefore I call Him to be so.

Now, I can line up around a thousand people who would be willing to testify that “Daniel Yordy sure didn’t look like Jesus with him.”

And they would be entirely correct – if they were referring to the image of the “super-Christ.”

But what exactly does Jesus with me look like? And are we calling such a thing by outward appearance or through faith?

Here are two things identical in meaning.

Summon God into your life and world. – Put the Lord Jesus Christ upon yourself.

But consider our picture from the last letter, that is, the Summons of God calling me into Himself blowing across me as a fierce wind and a gentle breeze, and often both at the same time, always shaping me and my life by the Words carried in the air.

Why was the Wind drawing me into God from my childhood? Because Jesus said to God, just before Gethsemane, “Father, I DESIRE Daniel Yordy to be here with Me inside of You.”

The Wind of God’s Summons to me is caused by Jesus’ Desire.

In the same way, the wind of my summons of God is caused by my desire. I place the Lord Jesus Christ upon every moment of my life all the way through and every moment and particulate today – BECAUSE I WANT Him to be so.

The time of the outpouring of a Spirit of deliverance at the Blueberry Community was a pure moving of the Spirit resulting in so much joy and good fruit in our lives. So very much. One thing that changed dramatically was that prior to that time, griping and complaining ruled the conversations in the communities. After that time, complaining was mostly gone, now become of little meaning to us.

Nonetheless, because of our horrific theology imposed upon the Jesus of our hearts, a number of really backwards ideas came into our thinking as part of the ongoing deliverance times. Here is what we thought – and I am expressing this in how I understand things today.

“Since you do not appear as we imagine “Christ” ought to look like, therefore your problem is a demon as a ‘stronghold’ which came into you through certain people or associations or circumstances in your life.”

And thus a “Mennonite” demon had to be cast out, or whatever heritage one came out from. Of course, some, upon leaving the move of God fellowship were then prayed for to be delivered from a “move of God” demon, something that did not go over well with those remaining in that fellowship.

And so, through the 1990’s, as marriage had brought me out of my self-protective shell, I began to see that there was something very wrong with me, that I could not “look like” what an anointed leader of God’s people ought to look like. I am so deeply grateful that no one could have know anything about “autism” because there is no question that, if that had been named regarding myself, then an “Asperger’s demon” would have been “cast out” of me. Such a thing would have pushed me over the edge upon which I was teetering into a complete mental breakdown by the end of 1998.

And so, through the 90’s, I labored over the question – what demons cause me not to look like the “super-Christ,” and from whence did they come? What holds do they have over me?

This spawned a fevered and frantic review of my life. Did my “problems” come from my parents? Did they come from my relationship with Henry Miller when I was a child? Did they come from the public school? Did they come from my Mennonite background?

I was trying to call my life by darkness in a frightened attempt to be delivered from evil, being defined as my not looking like the super-Christ. Clearly, the most WICKED part of this stream of evil thinking was calling my dear and godly parents by darkness.

When a person curses him or herself and calls their life and the places and circumstances through which they came by darkness, what are they doing and why? That person is calling death upon themselves and they are doing so because they love death, they want death, that is, NOT-God, to be with them.

Now, there is no question that moments of seizing bitter unforgiveness or actions by which we hurt other people with malevolent intent, or binding agreements we made with associations in this world, that those things do open doors for ongoing demonic influence in our lives.

The problem is that calling our lives by death works nothing but more death.

In complete contrast, as I have said from the start – Christ must be all first before anything not-Christ could ever vanish away.

I could not look too closely at any of these time periods in my life because of the remaining memories of pain. Nonetheless, as I wrote out those times and called every moment in them by the Lord Jesus Christ, drawing those who were an offense to me into the love of God poured out in my heart, guess what! – All the darkness fled, and now I see only joy and goodness through each season.

Christ is ALL first – and death and darkness flee away.

Now, let’s consider the concept of the last letter, the meaning and impact on our lives of God summoning us into Himself. But let’s turn that around using the same diagram.

Wow! Okay. Pause and breathe deeply.

Now, every human is doing exactly the same thing, only almost all (and we once as well) are calling Death upon their lives, by their desire, that is, NOT-God.

Man is the master, and death responds to our command.

I’m getting off topic. This letter is about the exercise of the last few months of writing the seasons of my life story.

What am I doing? First, I am giving an account of my life before God.

For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have spoken in the ear in inner rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops (Luke 12:2-3). –  But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment (Matthew 12:36). – And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account (Hebrews 4:13 – in the NKJV for dramatic effect).

Of truth all are doing the exact same thing. There is no hiding of anything.

Nonetheless, I know that there are many individuals who lived in the communities for a season who would absolutely NOT want their names to appear in my account of the move-of-God. I have no desire to be an offense to anyone, and so I don’t name people who had little or no connection to me. But if someone did have connection or impact on my life, then they are named. There is no getting away from it, and there is no libel if my account is factual.

Many refuse to believe that every hidden thing in their lives is not already broadcast into the knowledge of everyone else. Such thinking is fantasy without cause. That sounds terrible and stark, but only if we look at our lives as being separate from Christ.

I am not, however, detailing every little sin nor bringing in other people’s doings that had nothing to do with me. I tell only my own story. Giving an account is not gossiping or busying ourselves in other people’s affairs. Neither do we exalt the flesh by describing all its lurid details.

The second thing I am doing, then, is giving thanks in and for the sake of all things. This is an exercise of faith, a humbling of myself before God. By giving thanks in and for the sake of every moment of my life, painful or not, I am acknowledging my Father with me in all things. All of it is good; all of it is filled with purpose.

The third thing I am doing is placing the Lord Jesus Christ upon myself, upon every moment found in my memory.

And that’s the thing to understand. I am not “going back in time” and putting Jesus on something way back when. My memories are fresh and current, entirely part of my present self. By putting the Lord Jesus upon those memories, I am putting Him upon me right now.

The way God made me, however, means that when I write about any season or chapter of my life, I am there in my memory. For the next several days, all of that season feels to me like just yesterday, currently part of me. This is why I take breaks in-between the writing of each chapter. Everything must settle out inside and pass again into the distance, and new courage must arise in me to plunge into the next chapter. Yet when I am writing a chapter, I write furiously and I do not stop until it is finished.

Yet here is the most amazing thing that has happened each time, all the way through. When I look back at an earlier chapter, I find nothing in those memories that is unsettling or painful. Everything has become the goodness of God. You see, I will have to go through the entire account, over and over, to turn it into a book. If God were not my wholeness, I could never do such a thing. But that will not come until this entire account is finished and the goodness of God towards me fills everything.

By putting the Lord Jesus Christ upon every moment of my life, everything is rushing into a straight line, a clear path, straight into the knowledge of God, straight into Father revealed through me now and through us together. There could not be anything more wonderful.

Fourth, as I am writing this account, I am bringing every person named (and even those not named) into the love of God abounding in my heart. I am seizing each one into the Father’s intentions even as I am setting each one utterly free of me. Then, in humbling myself for their sakes, I am receiving each one back as one of my best friends forever.

And you know, this includes those against whom I sinned. You see, by stealing from them, I bound myself to them forever, to serve them in the joy and love of Christ. This is the good justice of God. What that will look like I do not know; I just know that it is true.

– All things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. –

As I write the various seasons of my life, then, something wonderful is happening. I am seeing so many wonderful patterns of God with me. You know that I love patterns.

To prepare for the next letter, “The Jesus Secret,” I intend to include a pattern of my life that I had not seen before my writing of these two chapters. This is a pattern of great importance to our task of calling God into our world. But first, I want to speculate on the meaning of God’s patterns in our lives.

And that is the fifth thing I am doing by writing this account; I am discovering the wondrous rhythms and flow that are all of God’s thoughts concerning me unfolding through all my days as a tapestry, a painting of God. And by these patterns, I know God’s knowing of me; I am found always coming out from my Father.

BUT – as I say that, I want you to know the same thing concerning God in your own life. Your life is different from mine and God with you is very different as well. The path of the Tabernacle outlines the similarities of our lives, but we know those things in very different and personal ways. As you call your own life by Christ, I know that you will see wondrous things regarding His purposes all through what you also once imagined to be a tangled web.

Now, you may have noticed that I have changed the JSV rendering of the Greek word, kairos, typically translated “time” to either “season of opportunity” or just “season.” Other translations do make use of both “season” and “opportunity” on occasion. The problem with the word “time” is how we interpret it according to a “superior” God who sets out His “will” and then expects us to comply and to “get it right,” in a single moment of time.

In contrast, the word “season” speaks much more clearly of the relationship between God and us, and that is, an unfolding of every word inside of God concerning us into the days of our life experience.

At the same time, I have translated the Greek aeonian into the word “age-unfolding,” that is that the fabric of the ages to come is not fixed, but rather flows out from the LIFE of Christ inside of us. Then, in Hebrews 1:2, it says of Jesus, “through Whom also He formed the ages.” This implies that the ages to come unfold out from WORD, out from the words inside of God flowing through the Person of Jesus and hence through our persons as well.

And thus we look at the various periods of our life and know them as seasons of the unfolding of the knowledge of God into us. This unfolding of the knowledge of God, by its nature, must then “roll up” the fantasy definitions of ourselves inside of which we once lived in fear and boasting.

The next chapter is titled “The Jesus Secret.” I first wrote this next section under that title, but then realized that I was missing my purpose for that title just a little bit. I saw, then, that this layout of a primary pattern of my life would fit well here. And so I am including this as a foundation for the next letter.

I want you to consider the difference between The Jesus Secret I, written in 2006-2007, and The Jesus Secret II, written in 2019-2020. There is, of course, much similarity between the two. Nonetheless, The Jesus Secret II is at a whole different level of knowing God.

In order for me to convey what I hope to convey I must give another account of the seasons of my life, but from a perspective that I have never considered before.

I am a man of great hope and my hope has always been in God. You know, as I think back now I realize that the reason I read The Lord of the Rings over and over through my teenage years was that Tolkien’s story filled me with hope. Nonetheless, I spent nine-and-a-half years of my Christian life with NO hope at all.

From December of 1975 until December of 1996, I was carried inside of HOPE that I would know God, that He would make me to be just like the Lord Jesus, and that I would hear Him say to me, “Well done.” I had zero idea how any of this would be, but I hoped, even at great cost.

By December of 1996, the very last shreds of hope were torn out from my heart. From December of 1996 until August of 2006, I lived with no hope at all. The crazy thing is that my lowest point of hopelessness was February of 1998. It was then that God spoke to me the only thing He has ever told me to do in my life. – “Give My people hope.” Although I recognized God speaking, I hardly even knew those words. What they meant was entirely beyond me.

Through the next several years, God brought great healing to me, but no hope. I had no hope that I would know God, no hope that God would make me like the Lord Jesus, and no hope that I would ever hear Him say, “Well done.” To be honest with you, the most terrible moment through those years of healing was just after I had started reading John Eldredge in tears. I was at home alone, in December of 2001, watching A Knight’s Tale with Heath Ledger. In the climax of the story, when Heath Ledger cried, “I will not run,” my heart was shredded all to pieces.

What I want you to consider is a man of great hope and desperate vulnerability, a man who NEEDS a SAVIOR all through his being, filled with an immense knowledge of what God actually says in the Bible and of the ways of the Holy Spirit in the church, utterly bereft of hope, an emptiness that held no answer for years. Place that man into an anointed service and have him hear the words, “Speak what God says you are.”

Here is the best line to describe what took place in me in that moment. – On that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened (Genesis 7:11).

When I wrote the confessions of faith in The Jesus Secret I, I had zero idea what any of it meant, but I wrote out from the an overwhelming, even desperate explosion of hope.

The confessions of faith in The Jesus Secret I are ignorant expressions of unrestrained HOPE. The confessions of faith in The Jesus Secret II flow out of the certain knowledge of my Father as my very heart.

The question is – what made the difference?

And even more than that, consider this present gushing forth of an open heavens coming through me now this January of 2020 in contrast to the deadened and sick dullness and hopelessness of June and July, 2006.

In June of 2006, I was booted out of the public school as a career option, having spent the prior semester utterly overwhelmed such that the moment I could walk away from that horror I became sick in body and soul. From August of 1998 on, I had set my hope on being able to provide for my family by teaching school. In July of 2006, that hope was utterly gone as well.

Consider July of 2006 versus January of 2020, in which I have just spoken and then listened to “Summoned into God,” a word far beyond anything I have known, a word approaching the voice of the seven thunders.

What made the difference?

It would be impossible to describe the IMPORTANCE of the answer to that question. It is the difference between LIFE and DEATH.

The difference is my speaking the same word that is Jesus, now made personal as me.
And inside of those thirteen-and-a-half years, from August of 2006 until January of 2020, what was the single most important moment?

The most important moment happened in October of 2011. It was then, during the season of the Feast of Tabernacles, when God turned me right-side up and I saw God as He is for the first time – God-IS beneath my feet – God utterly carries me. That statement slowly changed to what I would put before you as the single most important thing about God you must speak – God is meek and lowly of heart; God thinks more highly of others than He does of Himself. – God the All-Carrying One.

The most important thing I could do for you is to change your definition of God. But, of course, our definition of God and our definition of ourselves are tied entirely together. For that reason, I must also succeed in changing your definition of yourself.

But I cannot do either one, for only one thing will change God/yourself in your eyes. – You must speak the same word that is Jesus, now made personal as you.

At the same time, I cannot convey the utter importance of my hopelessness.

The Jesus Secret IS that it’s Jesus, not us. Jesus is the One who comes into union with us. Jesus is the One who accepts our flesh as His own. Jesus is the One who lives as us. But because it is Jesus living as us, we also live inside of Him, we also are every bit a part of all that He is.

By writing my life story, I am discovering that my whole life is the Jesus Secret, flowing always out from God. – God desires to make known the riches of the glory of this Secret, which is Jesus inside of Daniel Yordy, my incredible and certain HOPE of glory (Colossians 1:27 – modified and made personal – put your own name in the blank).