It's Supernatural

SID: Let me take you back. Your first face to face encounter with our Messiah, Jesus.

KIM: I encountered Jesus Christ for the first time when I was nine years of age. And on that day, I went to my grandparent’s house and the house was full of all these grieving people and everyone was weeping, and I was pushed into the arms of someone I didn’t know and they were crying so hard and they just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to tell you this. Your father has just murdered your mother and taken his own life. I’m sorry.” And I remember thinking, “You’re a liar!” And I popped out of this woman’s arms and ran out the door in this child’s effort to outrun the unthinkable, and ran and ran until there was nothing left and just fell down in the dirt, and I was gasping and crying and inhaling dirt and retching, and I could hear my voice start to cry out, “Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me. I need you now. Jesus, will you help me?” I didn’t even know who Jesus was. I wasn’t raised in the church. I’d only been to church twice that I can remember and–

SID: But why did you call out to him then?

KIM: Because Romans 1 is true, and within the heart of every man, there lies that place that we were intended to know him. It doesn’t matter who you are, how you were raised, or what culture you’re from. When our heart is being crushed, we know intuitively to turn to the one who made that heart because we know he’s the only one who can heal and restore it.

SID: And what happened to that broken heart, and you cried out to Jesus. What happened?

KIM: Romans 10:13 is true, and that simply says that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. The salvation is as near as your lips and your heart, a few verses above that, and that if you speak with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that he is the son of God and came to this earth, you will be saved. And I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was that in that moment I was no longer alone. The Lord of all creation had just knelt in the dirt beside a breaking child and took the hand that was reaching out to him. And my Jesus has never let go. Not then, not now, not ever.

SID: You use terminology that I don’t hear frequently used about God. You call him your wild God. What do you mean by wild God?

KIM: I love what he has made and I’m a wilderness girl, and I’ve spent a lot of time in his creation and who God is and what he does cannot be contained or confined. God is unfathomable. He’s uncontainable, he’s untamable. He’s wild and he never asks us to fully understand him because we can’t. But what he does ask us to do is to fully trust him, to move beyond what we understand, beyond our humanity, beyond our logic, beyond our education and all of our experiences, and as women certainly beyond our emotions, and step through that veil of humanity into the deep water that is the very presence of the living God and in this place is where we encounter the wildness that is his presence and it’s where he wants us to live.

SID: You also talk about wild simplicity. Explain that.

KIM: I heard a beloved African pastor once say so beautifully that the spirit of the living God, the Holy Spirit is like a great mighty river. You do not tell the river where to flow, don’t, don’t. Instead you jump in and you go where he takes you. And for us to follow the Lord, we can’t understand God, and what he is is so much bigger than what we can fathom. But what he’s calling us to do is so simple. Follow the one who knows the way. Pray, listen and do what he says. And this is the wild simplicity of our God. Anyone, anyone who calls Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and their Messiah can pray and listen and follow his voice.

KIM: Let me tell you what I mean. I’m learning how to just follow him where he wants to go. And recently I was teaching a large women’s conference and in between somebody ran up to me, reached over all these women and said, “My friend doesn’t think she can come. Can you sign her book?” And I started to sign it and was just stopped by the Holy Spirit. And my favorite prayer is, Holy Spirit lead me. And what I started to write was the dumbest poem you have ever heard in your life.

SID: Is that what you were thinking when you wrote it?

KIM: I’m writing to a woman I’ve never met, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky. I love you more than all the sand in the sea.”

SID: Did you want to find a rock and crawl under it?

KIM: Oh, my goodness. I’m like, “Lord, you got to be kidding me. This is awful. I don’t even know this woman. She’s going to think I’m an idiot.” I love you more than all the sand in the sea, and all this love together, it’s the love we share, you and me.

SID: This is a total stranger.

KIM: Yes. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most gag-atrocious poem in the world and it makes me want to barf in my mouth a little bit.” God bless you. Love, Kim. Here’s some verses to encourage you. And I hand it to this lady and she grabs it and I hold on like, “I can still rip out that page,” and I let the book go and I think, “Oh, Lord, I just made a fool out of you and me.” And God, he’s so funny and he’s such a good dad. And he said, “I’m God. You can’t make a fool out of me. How about if you just own your pride?” Dang it. It’s still in there. And so I confessed my pride, taught the conference. At the end of the conference, there’s a long line of women and it’s bending to the left and there’s a woman at the very end, and she’s destroyed.

KIM: So she comes up to me and she’s holding her fist under her chin and she’s just full body tremors, and I can see at that point she’s holding a book to her chest, and she grabs the cover and opens it and it’s the horrible poem book. And my first thought was, “Yeah, it really is that bad. It kind of made me cry a little too.” And she starts to point at it. She can barely speak. And then she says, “How did you know? How did you know, Kim? You could not know this. This is what my mom used to pray over me every night when I was a child, and my mom just died and I’m so lost without her, and I’ve been begging Jesus, if you’re real or you see my pain, will you let me know in a way that I know that it’s you and that I can trust you with my life? And now I know. Now I know.”

KIM: People, if you want to experience the wild simplicity of serving and following our Lord, ask him. Ask him, follow him where he wants to go. Pray, listen, and just do what he says.

SID: This is how kind of perspective works. Sometimes we only see part of the picture. Give me a real life example of that.

KIM: As I said before, I love the wilderness and I spend a lot of time in the high country, and I think it would be like viewing an avalanche from a distance. And when you’re a safe distance away, there’s nothing more beautiful and powerful, but to be caught in an avalanche, you would have a completely different perspective. Senseless pain only exists on this side of heaven. God’s plan always makes sense to him.

KIM: Case in point, we rescue horses and a while back we had rescued two young horses, and on their reentry into a herd, this horse had a catastrophic injury. She fell and I heard bones break. And we rushed in, four women and … four women, myself included, picked her up and her leg was completely backward. Her front right leg. We hustled her out, got her to a safe environment and I ran to my home to call the vet to come and stop a life. And while I was waiting for her to return my call, I was just weeping and saying, “God, I just don’t understand. This is senseless. This is a baby horse. This is senseless. Lord, help me understand.” In minutes was down, the vet was there and we walked into the corral and this horse was, not only was her leg in a normal position, she’s standing on it. We had prayed over the horse before the vet got there. She did an examination and the horse started walking.

KIM: And all she could surmise was that maybe the blade was dislocated, the shoulder, and when you moved her it was jostled back into place. No, but–

SID: That sounds like what a vet or a doctor would say.

KIM: So anyhow, I released my staff and–

SID: You knew better.

KIM: I did know better. And as I was following the vet back to her car and putting her things away, the Holy Spirit said, “Pursue her. This is about her. There’s much more.” And I looked at my friend’s beautiful face in the twilight, and I asked her, “Honey, are you okay?”

KIM: And she just started to mourn and grieve, and her head fell into her hands and she was just groaning and sobbing over just wave after wave of this just gut wrenching grief. And after probably 30 minutes, she finally said, she still had her hands in her face and she said, “I have made such a disaster out of my life. I didn’t know what to do. And so I made up my mind and when you called me tonight, I was sitting on the bed and I was holding a gun to my head, and I was trying to pull the trigger and I never needed someone to call me more. And then you did.”

KIM: And there in the twilight, the Lord allowed me to see that my call to end a life became his call to save a life. And this is the wild perspective of our God, and if we will trust him to keep moving forward, step for step, the wreckage around me does not change his perfect plan, and I can trust him for every single step. This is his wild perspective and he’s calling those who are his to trust him every step of the way.

SID: When I get to heaven, I’ll understand it all. In the meantime, God, I know you’re a loving God and I know everything that’s messed up in my life you’re turning around for good, so I’m through with my pity party.

KIM: Yeah.

SID: Kim’s grandfather taught her wisdom that few people on Earth, I mean have ever heard of. I’ll tell you this, it’s saved her life and it also is going to save your life. We’ll be right back.