The spirit of the prophetess doth rest within thy spirit… Do not wait for the ordinary; it shall not come.
I grew up in a church, considered by our circle in Petersburg, Virginia, as a house of prophecy. The prophetic words of my youth are blurry dreamscapes of memory. I hear the words, sense my age, remember the way my body felt, remember feeling the intentions of the speaker. All sounds are muted, except for their voice. I still feel the energy in the room, remember knowing where the focus of the congregation was, recall how I detected shiftings and progressions in this communal experience, how I felt what was being held back and what was being filtered through the vessel that sought to pour out what had been poured into it, untouched.
I heard prophecy so much that I could sense what parts of it were unchecked biases and what parts were the great knowing. I came to easily recognize when someone was getting in the way of the message, when it was hindered in some way or tainted. There was something deeply compelling about the cognizance of encountering words that knew me, words that were not strangers to my heart and experience. I knew when they were foreign, knew how to sift out the intruders that disrupted concurrence – the interjections, the oversteps. I don’t mean to say that the words that I instantly felt known by were ones that I agreed with. I mean they were words that invited me to a conversation that I didn’t know I needed to have.
I regularly received prophecy, or a word. This honor would uncover me as I sought to blend in. In fact, sometimes it felt like I couldn’t escape it. It was something to submit to thankfully and humbly. People that did not know me, ministers who had never been to our church would single me out in the middle of their sermons and then continue preaching. I began to recognize it coming from a distance. I felt the anticipation in my gut, a nervousness - the same kind I felt when I had a word to give to someone else. My heart would race. I could tell when the minister was searching for me in the middle of their preaching. They would hesitate a bit, squint their eyes, a little distracted, as they sought to stay on topic, and I nervously awaited for them to spot me, like Jonah bidding his time before admitting the storm was because of him being on the boat. They would announce their words and then continue their exhortation to the congregation. Sometimes I knew it would happen even before he took to the pulpit.
All throughout my upbringing, I heard prophecies at church – at the altar, during the message, during worship service. Sometimes they were spoken in tongues and we waited for someone else to step forward to announce their translation. The first one I am aware of was when I was too young to remember. My mother remembers it, though. Brother Tim told my mother that between my older brother and me that I would be the one to look after her in her old age. Not much else was said over me in this way until around junior high.
These experiences were a mingling of worry that my sins would indeed find me out and the comfort of being in the company of others who were communing with spirit on a regular basis. While I no longer believe in most evangelical doctrine, not the way they do, I deeply believe in spirit, in knowing, in recognition. These voices play over in my head regularly. I remember them and the way they knew me.
Blessing upon you our daughter… Everywhere she will go, there will be blessing, blessing, in Jesus’ name.
However, I do not think church leadership knew I could feel their hesitation when they called me a daughter or when they called me a prophetess. I knew Pastor had strategically said “spirit of the prophetess” instead of calling me a prophet. It kept the title as a seasonal appointment, one that could both ebb and flow. He would let me know what stage I was in, if need be. I knew that it was gendered for a reason, too. I felt the pause, the searching for words. He did not want to lay that mantel on me freely, to disclose it aloud. Leadership was not given other words though. They were given those words, and so they spoke them.
There was always a sensed moment of tension, “Did I speak out of line? Do you know who she is?” for visiting preachers that spoke over me as they glanced over at my pastor for their permission to continue, and there was always a nod with reluctancy from church leaders. I was not a likely candidate. I didn’t suit the expected hierarchy. I was nobody. Unmarried. I wasn’t related to leadership. I wasn’t “over” any ministry. In fact, my history was altogether inconvenient - a mixed girl from divorced parents (neither of which attended regularly), living in a dilapidated green and white trailer, hidden in the trees, surrounded by cow pastures and cornfields from a half hour away. Yet here they spoke over me as though I was a man of importance, someone soon to step out into his calling. I believed their words, both because the words knew me and because I was taught to trust leadership blindly. I eagerly preserved them in notebooks because I was taught that the word of god is precious.
… I am going to cause thee to write for me, yeah to draw from me… write, write, WRITE!
You are a writer. Do you know this? God is going to use you….
You have a gift, a real gift. God is going to use you in high places….
Occasionally, the words would hint at what I had endured along the way, the things I didn’t speak of and that no one asked about later.
There came a day when you were shattered like a mirror…
I usually would scramble to get the audio recording of their forecast and transcribe these verbal epistles that passed onto me without any of us wishing for it. I still hear them, those declarations over me, in the cadence of the voices where they first found a home. My body remembers those moments. Regularly, I am reminded of a purpose that I have often tried to shirk. I didn’t want to be seen so much. I didn’t want notoriety of any sort.
I wanted to get married immediately after high school, drive a minivan, and be the cool soccer mom with the best chocolate chip cookie recipe. I wanted children, as many as we could manage, through childbirth, fostering, and adoption. I even wanted my kids’ friends to be able to stay with us whenever they needed. This is all I wanted. It still hurts every single time someone asks me, “Do you have any children?”
I remember the way prophecy rose up in me, too.
God is making you to be a pillar among your friends...
He is longing to show you how he is the lifter of your head…
… You are running, but I can see it all over you – you have purpose. That hasn’t gone away.
It came out in conversation sometimes, this surety, this utterance from my bones, the radiating of a truth that did not come from me but out of me like water bursting forth. It happened in church and even in secular spaces. It was never something I worked up. In fact, I usually wrestled with it a bit, asking myself and god if the revelation might be just for me because I didn’t want to say it aloud. I didn’t want to draw that much attention. I didn’t want to risk speaking out of myself. I didn’t want to share me. It was a responsibility I carried and treated with something just this side of shame. I almost apologized for having something to say. I worried that I was getting in the way of the flow of spirit or that I was thinking too much of myself in the moment. Why should someone need to hear from me?
I have carried that over into my writing, into this history that gripped me long before I knew it, before I knew that the underlying reason I chose Hollins University was because the hills of Hollins - the very land itself - called me closer. I looked for a college with a writing program. I came across an image of the Hollins welcome sign and landscape in a search engine, and I couldn’t admit it at the time, but the writing program became the excuse I told others for why I was going. Something in me knew it was the place that I needed to be in. I knew it, knew it for years, but not in a part of me that I was familiar with recognizing as truth without someone cosigning. And so, I told myself the same excuse – that I was going there to learn how to write better. Meanwhile, I kept images of that expanse of Hollins earth on my computer, and whenever I had doubts, even when I moved to Texas for five years, I pulled up the images of the rolling hills of campus and knew I would get there someday. I knew it was my direction. I knew it the way that someone knows when they’re done with a thing. I knew it the way that I knew I wanted children.
Yet, it took me seven years to finally enroll in my dream school from the first moment that I saw it online in a computer lab at John Tyler Community College. Seven years to find a January opening of opportunity for my mother and I to leave our jobs at a local hospital, pack up all that we owned from my third apartment in Longview, Texas, stack it Tetris-style into a Budget Rental truck, and start driving east, towards Roanoke, Virginia. I told my mother that night, “I don’t know how far we’ll get, but we’re headed out of Texas.” I hid our cat in my winter coat to smuggle her into hotel rooms along the way.
Most of my life I have waited, waited for someone to claim me, to vouch for what I am doing. I have waited for support to tell me I’m allowed to go ahead, to assure me that I’ll have a home base, a covering to come back to. I have rarely felt that safety net. Still, I waited for it as my signal to move forward. I waited for things in my life to line up, as if once I got through this traumatic event, once I got over that challenge, I could move on and my life would line up in a succession of plot points that made sense to anyone looking on. I assumed it would be linear. It would have a recognizable pattern. It would look formulaic because I was taught that all good things happen because a particular plan was followed. My life, I was told, had a script I should follow, and it would look like all those around me.
Yet, my life has never done that, and so I have spent significant stretches of time just waiting for the coast to be clear. I have spent years waiting to find the funding for my research I began at Hollins. I have waited to be qualified, to have the resources to know how to navigate what I found there, or more accurately, what found me. I have struggled over and over with making things just right on the page and regularly rethinking my entire approach to this work. I have started again and again and again. I have begun in many different places.
Today, I start here.
