A friend once said to me, “Margaret, I think someday you will write a whole book of poetry.” I didn’t see how that could be since I only wrote a poem every year or so. But something supernatural happened that accelerated my poetry writing.
I traveled with a friend from Tulsa to a house meeting in the Fort Worth TX area to hear a speaker that we had seen online at the Toronto revival. John Scotland, a dignified pastor from Liverpool England, became very undignified in the Toronto meetings and then became known for ministering drunk in the Spirit. The meeting we drove to was a gathering at Bob and Cindy Parton’s home. Inspired by the Toronto revival, they were hosting soaking prayer meetings weekly in their house (Which they still continue to do now thirty years after Toronto!).
John Scotland was a guest speaker at the meeting that night and as always ministering quite unconventionally. He often used some sort of prophetic symbolism. This time he said he would be “pushing us into our destiny.” He explained that we all have destinies already in us and he would be symbolically pushing us into them—five times since that’s the number of grace. Men serving as “catchers” would stand us back up five times for him to finish pushing us. It was a wild wonderful night of laughter and drunkenness in the Spirit as dozens of us wanted John to push us over five times—by faith, into the Lord’s destiny for our life. I wasn’t prepared for the next few weeks after that night.
It was like I was trying to live a normal life under an avalanche of poetry writing. Words and phrases, words and phases just kept coming to me at the most inconvenient times. I just kept writing things down and trying to sort it all out. I could tell it was pieces and parts of several poems and I needed the Lord’s help to make sense of it. It was like some kind of dam had broken and I knew from then on that the Lord wanted to speak to me in the language of poetry. The flow has rarely been as fast and furious as it was in that season, but poetry became a regular part of my personal time with Jesus.
Not too long after that meeting, I did publish a whole book of poetry and John Scotland wrote the forward for it. He also read one of the poems from that book in a Toronto conference he spoke at in the summer of 2007. I shipped 100 books to be sold at that conference. The books that didn’t get sold I was allowed to give away at the door to people from all over the world as they were leaving.
I think we’re living in a season when our destinies are getting accelerated, pushed to new levels. As we see the Lord clearer, He shows us more clearly who we are in Him and what unique things He has created us to do with Him.