Friday:
We went to Lake Shasta and it is the houseboat capitol of USA. There must have been some 1000 houseboats on various marina's It was absolutely massive. The lake itself was full to the brim and was absolutely massive in terms of area size and I understand the water from the lake services the whole of California. We enjoyed a nice lunch at 'Tail of the Whale' restaurant at the lake and following lunch we went back to Bethel church in preparation for the evening service. The guest speaker was Ray Hughes and he delivered a powerful message . The church seems to have the capacity to draw some of the best speakers from this country and around the world to minister at the church, so we have been very blessed with people like Mario Murillo, Ray Hughes, etc, not to mention the home grown likes of Bill Johnson and Chris V.

Saturday:

Once again we attended the healing rooms and seeing that I've described this in earlier blogs I won't read what I said before. Suffice to say that it is a wonderful experience where worship is very strong particularly in the encounter room and in the healing room itself, the ministry team show great love,compassion and sensitivity. No I'm not healed yet! But the expression of love from the ministry team certainly allows you to leave having experienced His love and a touch from the Father to his people. And there are always people being healed (and I can't wait for the day when a stroke victim is one of them!), Having spoken to some of the Ministry team members, they admit that they have a higher level of expectation for somebody to be healed than they do for them not being healed. To me, this is a very exciting reflection and one shared by a number of people that we have spoken to over the last few weeks. The faith level and expectation level of people here is so high in that they find it more common for people to be healed than they do for people not to be healed. This is an exciting position and my prayer is that we in Australia will experience this as well where we can have an expectation that God will move and heal people as we pray.

Sunday:

We attended morning church and Bill Johnson gave an excellent message and as usual, the worship was powerful. We then went to 'Firestarters' which as described in earlier blogs is a fast track process to personally experience the Bethel culture. This week's fast track teaching was on the prophetic and they asked several people from the firestarters group to get up in front of the crowd and ask the Lord for a prophetic word over someone. Carole stood up as part of a team of about 10 people and she had a word for a coloured fella in the room. The word was, excuse the pun 'colourful' and spoke into his life and was very encouraging. It would appear that it was an accurate word for the bloke. Carole of course gained huge applause and attention.
We will probably purchase a DVD and some leaders material on firestarters, in the hope that we may be able to encourage this 12 week course with some of the church folk that we know at home.
Following this we did our normal thing and went to lunch. After lunch we returned to the prayer house and spent some quiet time there getting ready for the evening service.

The evening service was probably a bit long in terms of time and we were fairly tired having had a busy couple of days. We left immediately after church and didn't even go to the prophetic booths. We ended up getting home around about 930pm.

So these are some of our recent travels . There is a conference this coming week known as 'touching the hem of his garment' however it is for a maximum 100 people and it has been booked out for several weeks. Our intention is that we will go along in the hope that someone might have cancelled out of the conference and we may be able to attend. We have been praying about this the last couple of weeks and feel that it is a conference where we would gain a lot of hands on teaching relating to praying for the sick. So we will see how we go.

Personal reflections:

You may ask the question 'one of the reasons you went to Bethel was to get healing , you haven't received that so how are you feeling?'

That's a good question. Thanks for asking! My response is that I'm feeling calm and at peace about the whole matter. Even though it hasn't occurred to date, I am still pressing in and taking every opportunity for prayer and knocking on the door as often as I have the opportunity. I am contending for my healing and trying not to 'strive' about the matter. I felt like the Lord spoke to me about the subject of striving and I shared this in an earlier blog.
So as I approach the matter of seeking God for healing I am trying to do so with the foundation of: God is good; God loves me; and God desires to heal me. With that as my foundation, the question of healing is not so much 'if' but 'when'.

Also the whole opportunity to come here was also for a spiritual empowerment and I am in the process of having some of my attitudes and preconceptions dramatically challenged and so I'm feeling that God's hand is on me in that journey in preparation for a new revelation of Himself and clearer understanding of what my purpose is for my remaining years.
Well, that should bring you pretty much up to date with where things are at .
We are not doing a lot of travelling around the country, however it was never our intention to treat this as a tourism opportunity. Our intention has always been to position ourselves here at Bethel and attend as many activities as we could so that we might absorb some of the culture of this place and to be impacted in our lives accordingly. To this end, we are really happy that we are on this journey and doing these things and feel encouraged and blessed.

Thanks again for your interest. We bless you in Jesus name and trust that you also are experiencing greater levels of His love and affection.

Love Rob and Carole