Random, Creative Strike Force

Prayer Strategies

Strategy #1

Slaves obey; sons create.

This is a fundamental maxim that will color everything I do in preparation for the Passionate Manhood Part 3 seminar.

I am quite sure that only one or two people will come who earnestly desire to be a slave and maintain the mindset of a slave.  And I am not concerned about them.

On the other end of the spectrum, there will probably be 30 people there who are far advanced in sonship and building and really don’t need anything I am offering.

That leaves the bulk of the people who absolutely WANT to walk in sonship, to build creatively, to do the new, the amazing, the God-sized thing, but who have been marinated in “obedience” since they were knee high to a tree toad.

And those are the ones who we want to build a platform under.  They need wind under their wings, in a way that goes beyond what I teach.

I will CERTAINLY give them truck loads of ideas and strategies, but for the Holy Spirit to breathe on their innate creativity and bring it to high flame, would be a massively more valuable treasure to receive from the event.

So . . . you and your earned authority, matter immensely.

Let’s start this journey by sanctifying your gift of creativity.

Would you spend the next few weeks, until you receive the next strategy email, exploring your life to see how many creativity moments you can find and savor anew.

Whether it was your creativity, or God’s, or the two of you blended together, I think something substantial will happen if you hold up creativity as a “thing” and focus on calling it good.

People generally don’t call it bad, but outside the high dollar entertainers, there is not generally a venue to celebrate creativity as a vital gift from God.

For you to allocate some significant time to pondering and savoring the power of your gift in as many different applications as you can, will enhance the power of the things we do later.

Strategy #2

A picture:

I was at a restaurant with a small group who were all friends.  I was ostensibly there for their leader, and they were there to support her.  She was of African roots, ‘way back.

At some point in time, she told me about a vision God had given her and told her to do, and she asked me what I thought she should do.

We had a dust-up.

I challenged her about the wrongness of that question.

Why does a Black woman need to ask a White man in spiritual authority for permission to do what God had told her to do?

She wept, and that day the chains of slavery fell off, and she was free to be a daughter of the Most High and execute what He told her to do, without needing PERMISSION from others.

I heard from her once or twice since then, as she was out there leading in unusual ways, with enthusiasm and confidence.  It was beautiful.

Each of you random creative people have learned the lesson that some things have to be taken, when they will not be given and permission is one of those.

Somewhere – probably lots of times – you have deliberately chosen to defy the boo birds and do what you felt you should do, without the support most people would love to have.

You did it and you were proven right.

Take those memories and begin to war for the people who are like you – called to do something different, and they need to receive the permission God already gave them.

You know that battle because you have fought it more than once.

Press in and set those people free from the need for permission, so that when they come to the seminar, that battle is over and they can actively glean the tools they need.

Strategy #3

The first two albums of Passionate Manhood were designed to give mothers and wives tools to unleash their passive men.

At this seminar, we are overtly shifting gears and reaching out to the men who are already interested in building, and know they need some coaching.

However, there is still room for the moms and wives to come and be equipped.

Here is an excerpt from an email this week:

“Hello Arthur, I’ve been following your teachings for quite a few years.

“I have a son who is a Mercy.  He’s also recently been diagnosed high functioning autism which “causes him to be stubborn”, inattentive ADHD “which causes him to have executive function challenges and be disorganized”, and also depression from being frustrated and misunderstood his whole life.

“Over the past four years, my son has been diagnosed with so many things that have caused him to basically become a hermit.  He was outgoing and kind and you would never know anything was wrong with him if you saw him in the street or spoke with him.  He’s highly intelligent and funny and creative and artistic.  He’s just sunken into a shell over the last few years.  And the psychological community has a clinical justification for everything he’s going through but no solution.“

Don’tcha just HATE it? A random/creative gift of Mercy who has been labeled into paralysis.

He is so fortunate to have a mom who is a fighter, who believes in him and knows where to find people who can also believe in him and her.

Let’s specifically call in to the event, those who like her, are championing some messy people who need tools not labels.

Strategy #4

This prayer focus will be for a month.  In two weeks, I will be involved with the Blessing Your Heart seminar and will not have the emotional bandwidth to update you in my desired cadence of every two weeks.

Most creative types are quite inured to miscarriages.  Most of their dreams die an early death, shortly after conception, and they just shrug and go on to the next one.

But for each of these creative types, there is A dream that is larger, that keeps coming back into focus.

Would you ask God to breathe on the dreams of the ones He wants at the event, so that they come with an uncommon intensity, seeking to actually birth this thing, and not just self-medicate with another fanciful conception.

Strategy #5

Imagine you were in the Garden of Eden, instead of Adam and Eve.  You had all those resources and the mandate to take the Garden to the non-Garden part of the whole world.

Where would you begin?

The point of this exercise is intimacy.

There is no right way.  There are 100,000 legitimate ways to begin and carry out that agenda across millennia of life without arthritis.

And there was no deadline.  You would not have to transform X units of land each decade or generation.

I think one of the most amazing facets of that scenario would be boredom.  Imagine you sitting around with about ten generations of your descendants, celebrating a hundred projects that had all flourished.  Then you announce that this is highly productive, and just too boring.

The ensuing discussion would involve discarding the strategies they had been using so far – that worked amazingly – and developing new, creative strategies for making progress, not because you had to, but because you are all children of THE Creator, and it would just be so much more fun to do something new and different, than the same old, same old, tried and true method that absolutely works amazingly.

Now let’s leave the imaginary world and come back to our grubby little reality.  For many of us, our creativity has been most vigorously developed in crisis, from a position of poverty.

Not fun.  But not really bad.  Desperation has been known to foster creativity in so many different ways.

But there is a better way, and that is to see ourselves as children of THE Creator, who value creativity above productivity, since that is what the King’s kids ought to be like.

I will be laying out an abundance of strategies at this event.  People who are coming have a strong work ethic and have been marinated in the “ought to” and “get it right” mindsets.  Not a bad thing, in and of itself, but a deterrence to creativity.

Please read Proverbs 8 and savor the Holy Spirit’s exulting in the process of being the Creator.  Then ask for that Creative Passion to be instilled in each of those coming.

The cosmos that the Holy Spirit created, works.  He got it right.  But He was not celebrating accuracy.  He was celebrating the joy of extravagant creativity.  Pray that it will be contagious.

Strategy #6

Your mantra for the day is that “nothing succeeds like success.”  Every time someone succeeds at a new thing, it reinforces that they can indeed grow into it.

Your strike force is easily the most critical for the day.  I will be showcasing a new skill that will require rethinking everything they knew about how the Christian walk is supposed to play out.  It would be easy for the soul to be overwhelmed, kick back and just “audit” the seminar.

It would also be more than easy for God to run a parallel private seminar for each person there.  Every time I share an illustration about how God did X for me in Y situation in California, the Holy Spirit can cause them to remember when God did A for them in B situation in Nebraska.

And every single time the Spirit enables them to keep up with my flow of paradigms, and SEE for themselves that they do have the raw materials, and they do have the option of playing THAT Scrabble letter in THAT spot on the board, it will encourage them to stay in the game of the seminar.

Please cry out for the Holy Spirit to rummage through everyone’s journey and to extract dozens of data points that will customize the principles I share to each individual’s life, immediately, exquisitely, undeniably.

Ask Him to light a fire of confidence that yes, THEY can do this new thought process.