How I Decorate My Christmas Tree

Last week I posted a picture of my Christmas tree on my Facebook profile and received more comments than I've received about some of my more noble blogs! One woman asked how I decorated the tree. I remember seeing trees encrusted with ornaments in stores and friend's homes and marvelling at how people did it. No one actually taught me; but learning to decorate the Christmas tree has been a journey which began when I was a child.

The first step in decorating the Christmas tree is to have a love for Christmas itself. Christmas is celebrating the fact that Jesus came into the world. No one actually knows what date Jesus was born, but that is not important to me. What is important is that He came. I know all the stuff about pagan rites and the feast of saturnalia, but I don't care; and what's more, I don't think my Father in Heaven cares. He knows why I'm doing it, and He is totally OK with it.

While I'm decorating my tree, I remember the Christmases of my childhood, how I waited so long for the holiday to arrive and how simple gifts gave me a thrill. I remember the plastic nativity set that my parents had. My sister recently found one like it online and gave it to me for a Christmas gift a few Christmases ago.

I remember my Grandmother's house in Ennis, TX, the sweet musty smell of the old wallpaper and the creaking of the floor boards and the aluminum tree. We slept under heavy layers of homemade quilts on Christmas Eve and didn't care that the gas stove hadn't been lit yet when Christmas morning arrived. We lept out of bed with excitement and awakened our parents, because we weren't allowed to touch the stockings until they were there. Somehow during the night my folks had tiptoed into the living room past our sofa bed and had loaded each stocking with a big apple, a huge orange and a giant peppermint stick like we used to be able to buy in the school cafeteria for 5 cents. There was always a small bottle of Jergen's lotion and little items that increased the air of mystery. When all our other relatives had arrived and we had feasted on turkey, cornbread dressing, green beans, sweet potatoes, congealed salads and Aunt Demie's pecan pie, we would open the gifts under that aluminum tree. Before I new about ordering by  mail, I often wondered how my grandmother, who didn't drive, found such unique gifts. Aunt Olean had ordered them and they both had carefully wrapped them...

So in order to decorate a Christmas tree properly you need to recall your pleasant memories of Christmas. Your heart has to be in it, or your tree is going to look like Charlie Brown's because you are uninspired; or it will look professionally stiff and impersonal.

Selecting your tree is the next step. About ten years ago, Wal-Mart had a 9' pre-lit tree on a Black Friday sale for $29! I was up in the dark that morning driving over to make sure I got one. Real trees are a wonderful touch and their fragrance will bring back memories faster than visual stimulation, but my husband is allergic to them, so we opt for artificial. We place our tree on a coffee table that is approximately 2 feet high that makes the tree almost 12' high with its stand. This leaves plenty of room for the gifts and makes it harder for toddlers to grab the ornaments and eat them.

We cover the coffee table with an heirloom quilt made by my paternal grandmother. The quilt is backed with red satin which matches a tree skirt we bought at Sam's Club after Christmas last year. The tree stands in a place near the apex of the ceiling in our family room. It's a central location where we can look at it from the kitchen and the family room. From the fourth week in November, which is American Thanksgiving, until January 2 the day after New Year's, our tree is the centerpiece of our home's decor during the holiday season.

Joining the tree's sections is my husband's job. He fetches a tall ladder from the basement and climbs up. Some years we have an angel on top and other years we have a star. If you are able to wire the decorations on the top section and also place the star on the top branch before you put the top section on the tree, you will have an easier time. If not, I hope you are not afraid of heights!

The next step is to accumulate ornaments. I'm not a minimalist. I love gaudy, bauble-encrusted trees. I probably have over 1000 ornaments which I have accumulated during 40 years of marriage. Some of my ornaments are over fifty years old and hark back to my childhood in the 50's. For some reason I like apples, stars and angels, so I seize the opportunity to buy them wherever I can. I bought three garlands of large red apples in Staunton, VA over eleven years ago when we were there on an outreach to a prison nearby. When I hang those on the tree, I remember those outreaches, the prisoners and their hunger for God. Those memories warm my heart.

I have chosen a red and gold color scheme for most of the ornaments for my tree, because I love red and because red is dramatic. Sticking with a color scheme makes the tree visually pleasing. Without a color scheme the tree will look hodge podge and will lose impact. The colors have the power to anchor the decor and homogenize the hundreds of different ornaments into a whole.

Before I put the ornaments on, I hang the apple garlands next, which divide the tree into four sections making ornament placement easier. I start from the top left and slant the garlands to the lower right. Since our tree stands at a wall, we decorate all the visible angles, so the garlands only look like they encircle the entire tree. The mirror on the wall behind the tree lends the illusion of depth to the room reflecting ornaments and lights, so I make sure that I decorate the portion that shows in the mirror.

Next I hang the gold and red balls and individual apples on the branches from top to bottom. Almost every branch that is visible has at least one ornament. The fewer bare branches, the more "encrusted" your tree will look. Arrange and rearrange ornaments in order to achieve balance. Don't put all the red in one section, for example. Sprinkle the colors you have chosen evenly distributing them over the surface of the tree. Fill gaps between branches with ornaments large enough to fill the "holes." Step back and look from a distance to see these gaps and promptly fill them. Balance the decorations on the tree by hanging smaller ornaments near the top with larger ones near the bottom. Placing ornaments inside the branches gives the tree depth. Once the color theme is established with at least 80% of the ornaments, the tree can sustain multicolored ornaments which will blend in rather than detract.

After the balls are on, I open my treasure box of keepsake ornaments which include ornaments that Sarah and Billy made when they were little. One is a scene of Mary and Joseph's flight into Egypt with Jesus surrounded by a toothpick frame. Another is a picture of my son when he was a toddler framed in a styrofoam ball. I save every ornament someone gives me. My friend, Pam, has given me several papier mache angels. I have ornaments that are favors from parties and from banquets, ornaments on sale after Christmas at 90% off from Jo-Ann Fabrics! I also buy ornaments from souvenir shops and Christmas stores in places I visit. I have collected ornaments from places like Multnomah Falls in Oregon, Alaska, Yosemite and Texas. One year my cousin made me an ornament sewn in the shape of Texas with "Merry Christmas, Y'all" embroidered on it. In my travels abroad in years past, I collected ornaments from markets in England and Germany. My mother crocheted a set of white snowflakes for me over 35 years ago. I also collect nativity ornaments. One tiny scene of the town of Bethlehem is from my childhood when it was a receptacle for a large colored bulb illuminating the star. It was my mother-in-law, Gladys Fish, who sold me on white miniature lights in the '70's. They've been my preference ever since. Each one of the ornaments recalls a pleasant memory of a person or an event that meant something to me and our family.

 This year I decorated our tree slowly during three days before Thanksgiving. It was cold enough, so I turned on the fireplace. Taking my time gave me the ability to relax and to remember the wonder of previous holidays and think about the millions of other people all over the world who were decorating their trees, too. It also gave me time to find all those ornamentless "holes" and fill them so that they don't annoy me for six weeks.

Each year I thank God that I'm able to take the Christmas decorations out one more time. My mother used to wonder if everyone in the family would be together the next holiday when we took those boxes out of the closet again. One by one, they eventually were all gone except my sister and are now celebrating Christmas in heaven. In 2009 I suffered a brain hemorrhage. Although I walked out of the hospital in four days, it took months to completely recover. During that time, I wondered if I would ever live to see my Christmas decorations again. I did, and now I'm thankful more than ever for life and God's gift of celebrations.

I believe Christmas is a gift from God. He sent His only Son into the world to be the sacrifice for each person's sins so that we might live through Him. God does not require celebration as a duty anymore, but I believe that it pleases Him to see us finding what He has done for us enough cause to alter the courses of our lives and celebrate His goodness.
While I don't believe in ignoring the poor or in spending the household into debt at Christmastime, it is important to me to take this season to demonstrate a little bit of the same love that God has for us. Christmas is a time to honor Him and to honor my family and friends by making my home into a place full of wonder and joy, full of the same kind of happiness that created the memories that are dear to me; memories of a family who loved me enough to tell me about Jesus.

Your Christmas tree doesn't have to look like mine, it just has to be decorated out of love first for God and also for people. If love is your motive, your tree will become a unique reflection of your life, the way you love your family and the way you celebrate the holiday known as Christmas.

Opera Company of Philadelphia "Hallelujah!" Random Act of Culture

THE MIRACLE OF GENERATIONAL BLESSING

THE MIRACLE OF GENERATIONAL BLESSING


By Melinda Fish <>{

Last night our congregation celebrated the 60th wedding anniversary of Vasillina and Peter Olienyuk. They are the grandparents of the Doroshes who came to America and to our congregation in 1989 from Ukraine. Their daughter, Maria, is the “mother of all the living”-- or at least the eleven Dorosh kids, and Vitali is their dad. There should be a movie about their move to America and what has happened since. Among the eleven children there are two moms, another who is on the verge of giving birth, two engineers, a real estate entrepreneur, a businessman, a college administrator working on her master’s in English, a high school history teacher and a media specialist with the Pittsburgh Steelers. All a¬¬¬¬re Christians who have active relationships with God and who love Jesus Christ. All but two, who live out of state, are in our congregation.

I marveled at how we all came to be in the same room and at the millions of choices individuals have made over centuries culminating in our being together in that one room. Some of those choices were made out of simple duty or because every other option was cut off, but God, whose power is beyond limit worked through them all.

Vitali and Maria and their family were the first of the clan to arrive here. In March of 1989, the Lord spoke a word of prophecy to our congregation one Sunday morning: “This will be the year of the opening of the door of the prison door to them that are bound behind the iron curtain…If you will yoke your arm with my arm, you will see a miracle happen.”

A few weeks later we read in a Charisma Magazine that you could sponsor a Christian family from the Soviet Union looking for a home in America. The agency doubted that a congregation as small as ours could even handle such a project. We were disallowed at first; but finally, when they couldn’t find enough volunteers, they let us try. We decided to “go for broke” and asked for a big family. The Lord had spoken to our congregation earlier in the 80’s: “I am going to send you the people nobody else wants.” We had interpreted that as being the indigent from our own city, but we didn’t know what God was about to do.

We made preparations and found willing help from the people of Pittsburgh, many of whom are the children of eastern European immigrants themselves. We found a vacant “crack” house on the edge of our community and remodeled it. The landlord sold it for a very low price, and we filled it with carpet, appliances and furniture. The last Saturday in September 1989, the Doroshes arrived. They had been staying in a dormitory in Philadelphia because their family was so large that no one wanted them. For me, it was love at first sight. They were beautiful, Vitali and Maria with their eleven blonde “stair steps.” The family had lived in a small apartment with a tiny box refrigerator back home in Ukraine. When Maria saw the house, the furniture and all the appliances, she hugged me and exclaimed in broken English through tears, “My sister, my friend!”

In all my 61 years, I have never seen the clear fulfillment of true prophecy as I have in this. Nor have I seen a greater avalanche of answered prayers. The Lord covered the tiniest detail with miraculous power. That November, about six weeks after their arrival, the Berlin wall fell, and Peter Jennings headlined the ABC news broadcast that night with, “Tonight, the prison doors of the iron curtain have opened!” It was the same word the Lord had spoken to us that Sunday in March!

A few years later, the Olienyuks arrived, too, to walk in freedom with their children and grandchildren. I am in awe of their sacrifice, leaving loved ones behind, embarking at an old age to embrace a new country. They still don’t speak English, but they come to church every week and sit patiently in the congregation smiling, enjoying the privilege of churchgoing, even if they can’t understand anything that’s going on! In fact, they go to two churches also attending a Ukrainian Baptist Church, too,--every week. They lived through the tyranny of Communism which forbade them from even going to church at all except in secret so they are taking advantage of the chance to go even though Vasillina is 79 and Peter is 85.

Today the eleven Dorosh kids, their grandchildren, are all adults. Eight of them have families of their own who are all Christians. When I looked at the Olienyuks, their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren last night, I realized how powerful the simple choice of receiving Jesus Christ is in opening not only your life, but also the lives of those who come after you to the power of generational blessing. So many Christians believe in mysterious powers of generational curses; but I don’t believe that Christians inherit curses. Jesus never taught that. The cross of Jesus annihilated that satanic power. When someone is born again, like a newborn baby, he has no past. As a Christian he has the free will to follow Jesus or to use that free will to live selfishly. It’s the day of the New Covenant now; you are free to choose. (Ezekiel 18) If you deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus, that path is difficult, but the destination is blessing. It’s the high road.

The Olienyuks, long before I was born, chose Jesus Christ and in so doing, they chose blessing. They have been faithful to each other for 60 years. Last night, that roomful of people, representing hundreds more rooms full of people yet to come, was a tangible foretaste of the truth that following Jesus Christ is loaded with generational blessing both now and in eternity. Generational blessing can start with you and your choice to follow Jesus, too, beginning with receiving Him as your Lord and Saviour and then developing your relationship with Him.

The greatest people in the world are the folks who walk out their relationship with Jesus simply, obeying what they believe He tells them to do. The real heroes are the ones who love God and their neighbors without anyone watching. They live this way because they know that God is watching. They demonstrate real faith in the power of the leaven of the Kingdom of Heaven to influence generations by “living sensibly, righteously and godly in this present age.”

I wonder how many blessings have come into my life because my ancestors chose Jesus Christ and Kingdom values. It must have eclipsed all their sin, because I have a heritage of generations who followed Jesus Christ. They did not give me wealth. Instead, they gave me the opportunity of knowing Jesus Christ. How many of my descendants will have those blessings, too? The Olienyuks are not leaving behind a legacy of wealth or fame. Instead, they have left one far better, the blessing of living a life with Jesus, the only blessing that is eternal.

Am I "Fine" With Being Redefined?

It's so hard to feel spiritual some days. Everything is so normal and regular. Last Friday I had a day like that, and I was so "antsy" that I couldn't be still. I kept thinking about that season in my life when I was traveling several times a month, and I was grieving over why it wasn't happening now. It's hard to let go of what you think your life should be, but it's necessary to embrace what is happening now. I needed to acknowledge God in it. Maybe that part of my life is over and maybe I won't ever do that again, and what if it don't? Am I OK with that?


All this peace and quiet has affected us financially. I am amazed that after having two-thirds of our income removed that we are still making it. Our insurance premium just went up from $1500/month to $1650/month. My last editorial in SPREAD THE FIRE MAGAZINE has turned out to be prophetic. It was about being faithful when God turns out the lights. I want to be faithful in the dark. I don't want to "compass myself about with sparks" as Isaiah said by trying to light my own fire and having what I do dissipate into nothing in eternity. I'm jealous sometimes wondering if I've missed it. I'm looking for another job; but so far, there's no demand for folks with a resume like mine. (If you have one for me, let me know!)


On Saturday night at church the Lord began to direct the congregation to talk about "seeing" the same thing and flowing together in the unity of the Spirit. Rather than "how to," the folks were marvelling at the love God has created for each other and the peace that comes with it. As folks started sharing, it was as though Jesus Himself was speaking to me directly. The conversation was prophetic. The Lord was talking to me through the others without their even knowing it about allowing Him to define who I am and what I do at any moment in my life. Peace took hold in my heart again. I left the meeting later that night comforted and edified. I received a light on what God is doing in my life right now. 


This sometimes unbearable lull is for a reason. God is redefining who I am to suit His wonderful ultimate purpose for my life. He loves me and has been showing me in ways that I haven't seen before until now in the quiet and simple and the one-to-one. Is that as important to Him as speaking to crowds?


Today I gave my undivided attention to my grandson, Liam, who was fascinated with a trip to the Carnegie Museum. I didn't take my eyes off him marvelling with him about the wonders he had seen and the ability to have a yearly pass to all the museums. He said, "Grandma, you are part of our family, so that means you can come with us, too, absolutely free!"


I didn't perform a sign or wonder today, instead I gave my grandson my undivided attention. If I can't do that at any time in my life and be content, what business do I have speaking to anybody?


Jesus didn't seem to care if He ministered to one person or a crowd. He seemed content to do whatever crossed His path seeing His Father's purpose in all of it. What if the pursuits that I think are fruitful really don't matter to Him at all? What if God has a purpose that we cannot see, and what if what we do even on normal days precisely fits in to the magnificent whole in His eyes? I think I need to "see" what He sees, how He "sees" it so that we can flow together. And even if He doesn't want to share with me the importance of what I'm doing, can I trust Him anyway?


I am learning to let go of the old definition of myself and embrace the one He has for me today even if I don't know what it is. It's not about knowing your destiny or office in the body of Christ. It's about simply obeying Him today just because I love Him.

I'm grateful for my " babies"

It's wonderful to have two awesome kids who have changed your life for the better. My daughter, Sarah, has continually challenged me to change and to let go of old ways. She is a fabulous mother who does things like sleep on the floor with her 4 yr old son because he has a stomach virus and is throwing up. I should have done that, but Sarah grew up to be a loving mother anyway. Sarah has helped me to learn to break out of my box and try new things, including Facebook, blogging, and trying new ways of doing church. She has values that are real and has little time at all for phoney baloney people who want to hide behind superspiritual masks. My mother has gone to heaven, but she would love the way Sarah speaks her mind, they way she writes and her obsession with punctuation and word usage! (My mother was the chairman of the English dept. at  our high school...I'm sure that's a surprise.) Sarah loves and honors her handsome, Sean, whom I've nicknamed the "top son-in-law" because he is!

I'm also thankful for my son, Bill, or "B" as the family knows him. He originally had no less than 16 nicknames, all terms of endearment, but B is the one that stuck. B is the epitome of delight who carries a  sense of humor which is so similar to mine that we spend our moments pulling each other's chains. He is a genius, too, like his sister and his dad and can trade puns like no one but my husband. B loves his wife, Caroline, in a way that you can tell it. He is nuts about her and her charming N. Irish accent and her family values. B loves his own "little B, his little Ben" and has become a father who plays with his son just like his Dad played with him. B has been brave through several hardships that have overcome lesser men, but I admire his grace under trial and that he keeps plowing through to stand where he believes God told him to stand. His name means "bold protector" and he's living it out.  

So if you want to become my enemy, just pick on my kids. My husband and I are so proud of them that when we think of all God's blessings on our life together, they are at the top of the list. They are both in their 30's, but I've promised to pinch their cheeks when they are 40---and beyond. I still have those "mommy" type feelings when I see them and their beautiful families. I don't know what to do with those feelings anymore. Maybe the way I feel about them is similar to the way God feels about us, longing to make an easier path for them, to help them and still nurture them when I have a chance. Letting go of those feelings is impossible for me. I count them as love even though they probably sometimes think of them as a nuisance. I still love my "babies" more than life itself and would fling myself in front of a garbage truck in order to save them. I guess that's like God, too, huh?  

The Front Row of Heaven

     Right now our teeny-weeny congregation is fixing up an apartment at the church so that our children's pastor, Nancy Westerberg, will have a place to live. Nancy is in her 70's and for over thirty years, she has led a puppet ministry from our congregation that has mobilized children and adults to minister at nursing homes to the infirm and elderly. She has also visited these homes every week for years. Her ministry to the children has produced some of the finest Christians who have grown into mature adults who love Jesus and have her values. She has also ministered to numerous "brats" that wandered through the mix and left completely unchanged. For this, she deserve the "congregational medal of honor!" Nancy has done all this without any notoriety and because she loves Jesus. She doesn't charge the nursing homes for her services, she does it to lavish love on Jesus. Nancy was widowed more than six years ago and her children are either far away or are unable to care for her.

Nancy has lived in a small house which is now in a neighborhood that is becoming unsafe. (Last week someone broke into the house next door in broad daylight!) Our teeny weeny church cannot support more than one employee any more, so we are doing what we can and carving out a place for her to live in our church building. She will be safe there, and because she is one of God's "temple treasures," she belongs there.

I have often teased Nancy saying, "You will be on the 'front row' in heaven, and I will be in the 'parking lot' with binoculars." I don't know that the concept of a "front row" in heaven is biblically sound. However, it's my way of saying that God's ability to see in secret and reward openly will extend far beyond ours. The values of God's Kingdom are the total reverse of this world's, even the church world's. I believe that heaven will be a major shock to most of us. You will probably be rewarded for things that you never dreamed God saw, and the things you thought God would surely see may not have attracted His gaze at all.

Sometimes I do things from mixed motives, but the things I enjoy doing the most are the ones that are done out of love and in secret? I cannot even evaluate them in the same way God does, but I am learning to live life in view of eternity. It's about time, wouldn't you say? When you live life in view of eternity, you live it knowing that God is watching. It's important to honor the people around you who are humble and who you know that God will honor. How awful to arrive in heaven and realize that you failed to acknowledge humble servants around you who served faithfully without your notice! What if God will be honoring those whom you ignored or even had contempt for?

Before you experience the humiliation of Hamaan, maybe it's time to look around you and ask God to give you His eyes to see the acts of kindness done in humility and love the "regular" people around you are demonstrating without hope of earthly reward or notice. And why not try to become more like those people and become a blessing to them. Perhaps, if you notice them, they will see it as God giving them a tiny deposit of their reward in heaven.

I'm not sure what sort of reward awaits us in heaven. I think God has made it clear that he wants it to be a surprise. I doubt that it is "stuff" like shopping money or fancy houses as we know them here. Maybe it's something as simple as proximity to Jesus which must be the most pleasurable of all experiences. I've always thought that I probably won't be on the front row of heaven. More likely, I'll be in the "parking lot" with binoculars! (If I am, I will be having a tailgate party.) Before you have to join me, try burying yourself in your normal life and doing things that only God sees. This is the path to real joy and contentment, the one Jesus taught. 

By the way, if you believe the Lord is leading you to contribute to the fund to fix up Nancy's apartment, you can contribute to this fund by making out your check to River City Church of Pittsburgh and designating it to "building fund" at the bottom. Mail it to RCCOP, 330 Edgewood Ave, Trafford, PA 15085. Any freewill gifts will be deeply appreciated here on earth and undoubtedly rewarded in heaven and also tax deductible!

RESTORING THE WOUNDED WOMAN

My book, RESTORING THE WOUNDED WOMAN is now available to download for those of you who have an epub reader. Google "free epub readers" and download it if you need one. Then go to the link below.
RESTORING THE WOUNDED WOMAN was first published in 1993 by Chosen Books. It's my personal best seller having enjoyed a publishing life of nearly eighteen years. It is written for the wounded Christian who finds herself riding on a roller coaster of hope and disappointment regarding a long-term unanswered prayer. It is easy to find yourself with the "barrenness syndrome." Whether it is an unsaved husband, the inability to conceive, a bad or abusive relationship or if you or someone you know is caught in the throes of grief, the person who finds herself without support can be devastated. It is sometimes difficult to turn to the body of Christ for fear of seeming "spiritually incorrect." This book helps you find hope and encouragement through reading about how other women have received healing. You can find hope when hope is gone.
http://www.epubbud.com/book.php?g=G5GPMGK8

Let's Let God Do the Counting

A friend said to me once that he wasn’t content with having hosted revival. He wanted to leave something behind. He didn’t want to be like George Whitefield in the revival of the 1700’s. Whitefield did not leave an organization behind although he was a prominent preacher in that awakening.  According to my friend, Whitefield’s failure to build an organization caused him to lose the fruit of the revival. This leader wanted to be like John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist denomination.  It seemed important to this leader that he package the essence of the revival so that it could be spread in a tangible form.
 The meeting started before I had time to tell him that if he were alive today, Wesley wouldn’t be able to recognize the organization he founded. The larger part of the organization now repudiates Wesley’s values. And even the more conservative parts of that organization that now bears his name have hardened to the point that the organization could not embrace what God has done in subsequent generations.
An organization doesn’t usually get hungry for God. In fact, a new wave often threatens it. Have you ever noticed how each new wave of revival in church history does not usually begin with a denomination that already exists?  If it does start in a congregation that is part of a larger group, it’s not long before conflict ensues and the new wave gets booted because the old group is not flexible enough to change. God always goes to the bottom of the “food chain” when He’s looking for someone to use. For this reason, God always seems to go outside the religious system of the day just like He did when Jesus was born. He starts fresh. That is why I don’t believe that the Holy Spirit pours Himself out so that we can start a new denomination. I believe He wants us to hold the blessing with an open hand, because it is not ours anyway. In a Kingdom where the least is really the greatest, do I really want something with my name or label on it? In fact, I wonder if anything with a man on top and a human label on it is what He is after. It is destined to only be a replacement for His much larger Kingdom and inhibits its members from perceiving the much larger whole.
 Assuming that a revival needs to be packaged and that God has selected us to do it has at least two problems. The first problem emerges when human beings try to condense the entirety of the Spirit’s work  to a few values as though these were new values and weren’t already the values of God’s Kingdom. When we try to condense and label anything God has done, the lid goes on. Nothing else can happen that we haven’t already seen. He wants us to remain open and teachable so that our revelation of Jesus can grow.  I believe that the fruit of any revival is defined in the whole of what the Holy Spirit has done to every person affected by it. My husband, Bill, believes that when a revival’s leaders define it any other way, they take the first step in quenching it.
The second of many more problems is the assumption that the fruit of a revival is tangible. The truth is that it is intangible. During the Welsh revival, thousands of ordinary and extraordinary people came to Moriah Chapel in Loughor, Wales to hear the preaching of Evan Roberts. One account I read described the drawing of the Holy Spirit to that place to be so strong that fishermen at sea were compelled to come to the meetings when they had no intention or desire to do so. If the Holy Spirit was up to that kind of supernatural activity, how can anyone be sure that the Welsh Revival’s fruit was lost because no one started a “club” out of what was left? That revival’s fruit is the leaven of the Kingdom of Heaven which is forever in the spirits of believers who are now in heaven and who were swept into God’s Kingdom because of it. The fruit was also alive in the Azusa Street revival whose leaders experienced the impact of the Welsh Revival simply by hearing of it. The fruit of it also lives in the generations of people that followed whose lives were transformed by their ancestors who came to Jesus in that revival and who then affected their own generations, often with only one person at a time.
To say that the fruit of anything God has done was lost begs the question: lost to whom? If you mean that the numbers of people who were touched by the Holy Spirit in it are no longer collected in a crowd that you can count, it only means that the fruit is lost to your human eye—not our Heavenly Father’s. The Lord reminded me one day, “You will never have an instrument that will enable you to evaluate your own success or that of anyone else.” I don’t think I am capable of accurately judging the fruit of either Wesley or Whitefield. My eyes can’t see as well as His, and I doubt that I can count that high!
No doubt, there were individuals in every move of God who lost the fruit of revival in their own lives just like the seeds which fell upon bad ground in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower. There is nothing we can do about that. They were held accountable in eternity. However, I personally met a man who was mentored by leaders in the Welsh revival. This man had been an alcoholic before the Lord led him to the feet of these men and women who had experienced the power of the Holy Spirit during the Welsh Revival. He was not only saved, but he was transformed into a Christian leader who founded a congregation in Scotland. There are thousands like him if not millions.
So I wonder if God really sees George Whitefield as any less a good steward than Wesley because he failed to use his God-given influence to start an organization. What if he has greater reward in heaven because he let his lifework dissolve into the Kingdom of God? I wonder who has the greater faith, the one who remains faithful to God even though he cannot see his own fruit or the one who demands to see it now.  What if George Whitefield was really trusting Jesus to gather the genuine fruit into His barn and did not trust himself to do the counting.
Over 30 years ago someone told me, “Denominations are what’s left when the Spirit of God has come and gone.” They were speaking of the practice of taking hold of a revival and building a “club” out of its remains. In these clubs, there is always a hierarchy, visible or invisible. (A Methodist bishop once told me, “The Baptists have their bishops, too. You just don’t know who they are!”) It masquerades as a form of the unity of the Spirit, but it is far from a community of peers and goes the way of every organization of men into apostasy and form, devoid of the Holy Spirit’s true nature.
 No one admits this in the excitement of the planning days. It’s too easy to hide our own motives from ourselves behind the façade of “we need to do this because…” and fall into self-deception about the true reasons we are building this organization; but regardless of one’s own spin, God sees, and He knows. God has the last word. Not one of us will be getting by with anything that will not pass through the judgment. One of the first things to burn will be our own kingdoms, the “clubs” of men who wanted something other than His Kingdom. All that will be left among the smoldering ruins will be the true containers of revival, the hearts of men.
And by the way, trying to divorce yourself from anyone in Jesus’ body by saying, “I am of Christ,” is just as bad. It’s only the Lord Himself who can protect you from yourself. You still must acknowledge that you need them whether or not they ever again see that they need you. Leave the door open.
I believe that we are not entitled to form an organization other than the one that Jesus established, His church. I don’t think God expects you to identify with a subgroup for “safety.” I do believe in having real relationships with other Christians; but unless you have a sincere relationship with someone, signing on the dotted line won’t improve it. It will hinder it. Real relationships are what they are and no more. You cannot improve them by signing over your loyalty and your tithe. If they demand you do that before they will acknowledge that you are worth their fellowship, are they really your friends? And would you sincerely want to give them your allegiance or follow their leadership? Before you have to learn your lesson the hard way, maybe it’s time to ask, why am I really doing this?
I believe that if there is a “front row” in heaven, it will not be occupied with those who wanted to capture the Holy Spirit. It will not likely be filled with the folks who looked to that which was seen; but instead, it will likely be filled with the ordinary folks who looked to the unseen things of eternity and who let God do the counting.