He cares about me. He knows what I am going through. He is for me and not against me. I am not alone. It’s not too late for me. Maybe I am significant.”
These were my thoughts the first time a person gave me a personal prophetic word.
It was 1996. For nine months, I had been in the middle of Brownsville Revival—quite literally. Because I was a columnist for the Remnant Newspaper and the editor of the Brownsville Revival Magazine, I had been assigned two of the best seats in the house. I was on the prayer team and so I did not have to wait in line outside for eight hours, rain or shine, with the thousands of others. My job as a host meant that I was to help the leaders, usually very high-level leaders, to first acclimate and then process what they were seeing and feeling.
One ministry leader, visiting from Germany, was especially quiet throughout the week. He was the founding executive director of European Coalition for Israel, which provides crucial Christian perspective to members of the European Union and United Nations. After a few days he suddenly turned to me and said that the Lord had shown him something he would like to share with me.
The first scene he described gave me direction regarding the need for me to draw one of my children in closer to me. It was so personal that I broke into tears because I was a single mom of three who was wholly dependent on God’s help each day.
The second scene he shared illustrated past and present events. The elderly man, who had dedicated one of the ships in his fleet in Hamburg, Germany, to transport people of Jewish descent and all their belongings from Romania to Israel over the course of a year in the 1980s, said he saw me digging, by myself, in a dry desert that had very hard ground. After a long while of digging I hit water that bubbled up and spread around the world at an ankle-deep level.
The next part spoke of the future. The water dried up and I was once again digging in the hard ground of the desert by myself. After a while a few people came alongside me while I dug. When more people joined me while I was digging, the ground moistened. The very soft-spoken gentleman continued, “You will dig until a geyser shoots up in the sky and water around you will rise, first ankle deep and then knee deep and then when it is waist deep it will spread quickly around the world.”
He asked me if I knew what was in geyser water and I said, “Sulfur.”
While I was thinking about how the water in the geysers smells like rotten eggs, he said, “Sulfur is for healing. People travel many miles to sit in healing waters of geysers that contain sulfur.” The conservatively dressed gentlemen explained to me that the ankle-deep water was that Brownsville Revival. But a time would come when I would return to digging alone in the dry and hard ground of the desert.
Afterward, one of the pastors traveling with him explained that prophetic words often come in twos or threes. The first builds faith for the prophecies that follow because the first will be so personal that there is no way the person giving the prophecy could have known the details or significance of the situation beforehand.
“When that time comes, Renee, you will keep digging until you hit that geyser!” the gentleman continued.
I believe that digging is different for everyone. Over the years the prophecy about the geyser has come to mind when things in my life and in the world at large look bleak. For me, digging has been stretching way beyond my comfort zone to walk through doors that suddenly and unexpectedly open for me through a series of events that only God could possibly orchestrate.
Digging deeper, either intentionally or because of desperation, always builds our faith because God always meets us there. In our own journey to dig deeper, we all need to take steps toward the maturity needed to be transparent about our frailties with trusted friends and loved ones who will hold us accountable to God’s ways.
Renee DeLoriea is a contributor to Charisma Media. She lives in Nashville.
