8 + Splash

One day the Lord asked me to write a book on how I learned about prophecy and that seemed hard enough, but then his angel came to me and said I should name the book "8 + Splash" ...
I had kept a very careful record of everything I heard God tell me since I was a new Christian so I had plenty of source material-my personal prophecy record by now spans 35 years and me living in three different countries and runs into the thousands of pages! The problem wasn't the lack of having things to say. In fact I had to cut hundreds of words and visions from this account, first because they were not strictly on how I learned about prophecy but were more just how God was dealing with me on a day-to-day basis or speaking to me on other topics. But also because the volume is just too much to share! So this book is focused on how I learned itself and is certainly not everything God told me over these years!

Habbakuk asked God a perplexing question and waited for an answer and in chapter 2:2-3 he said:
2 And the Lord answered me:
"Write the vision;
make it plain on tablets,
so he may run who reads it.
3 For still the vision awaits its appointed time;
it hastens to the end-it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
it will surely come; it will not delay. (ESV)
So write the vision, make it plain, wait for his word if it seems slow. It will come to pass and won't prove false. But how long are you willing to wait for God's word to come to pass? A month? Six? A year? I sure hope it won't be longer than that ... but I waited on this word, reading it often, thinking about it sometimes daily for nearly 30 years. Proverbs 13:12 knows what it's talking about saying:
Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
But when the desire comes, it is a tree of life. (NKJV)
Hope deferred makes the heart sick but when God's word finally comes to pass ... there is life!
For me when the prophesied season of flowers finally came I suddenly saw so many things in a new light and I soon felt the Lord lead me to pick up this manuscript again ... and with new life, spiritual healing and renewed strength I seemed to finish it in just a few days ...
This is a personal story the Lord asked me to share with you and yes, it's often embarrassing, a few times scary, no, it's never boring and certainly not predictable-but it is pretty much always supernatural-how could God talking to us and directing our lives be anything other?
But for better or worse, this is how I learned about prophecy.

A Literary Companion
And many times telling this story I wanted to just stop and explain better about how I understood things right at that moment in time, or what our doctrines were back then, or my own beliefs-but God kept telling me not to do that. It turns out He had a better plan instead!
Now I understand since He also asked me to write a separate book to just talk about what I think which is the book 10 Things on Prophecy where Jesus just asked me to have a fireside chat about the things I've leaned over 30-plus years regarding prophecy-not making hard and fast rules, not making a list of doctrines but instead just having a casual chat on these oftentimes difficult topics.
So that book, 10 Things, is a companion book to this one, 8 + Splash-they both deal with the same topic-prophecy-but do it from quite different perspectives.
So I suppose while 10 Things is a book sharing WHAT I learned-this book now is sharing HOW I learned it. Both are valuable but in different ways.
Yes, Experience is a good teacher, but actually the Holy Spirit is a better one. We learn by our mistakes, only sometimes-it is far easier to learn from God's imparted wisdom directly without first making the mistakes ourselves!
I'm not sharing these personal things to glory in my hardships, but to help people learn from them so they won't have to make the same mistakes I did!