Encouragement, not discouragement Richard V. Milner Jun 15, 2002

I had an incident happen today that I believe the Lord allowed to happen so that I could tell you about it. Have you ever had something in your life that you know the Lord told you to do and it is really weird and no one else catches the dream. Well that is what happens to us on this subject. I don't know how to explain this, so I am just going to say it. This is inline with the letter I wrote about faith. The Lord told us we have dominion over all the creatures on this earth. "Gen 1:28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Well we took that literally. We command fire ants to leave our property so that we don't have to kill them because they were in our way. We command the wasp's to leave and rebuild somewhere else so that we don't have to kill them and they move. And we also catch the bugs in our house and bless them and release them outside. This started as a big step of faith 3 years ago. Father spoke to me one Saturday morning, as I was about to kill a spider. My cousin was living with us at the time and she is a witness to these happenings. The Lord said to leave the spider alone, so in faith I did. He didn't explain to me why to not kill the spider, He just said not to, so I didn't. Well this was not going to be a cool thing to tell Renee, Elaine and Steven to leave the spiders alone. Each time I thought of them and the spider, I saw a shoe in their hand going after the spider. But I too had to trust that they were going to listen to me and respect what I heard from the Lord. After a period of time, more spiders came into the house. They were Jumping Spiders, I don't really know the name for them, but jumping spiders is what I have always heard them called. So they are Jumping Spiders. As the spiders came into the house the others people in the house got a little shoey. There would pick up a shoe or something else and try to kill those spiders, but ending up not doing it. After a period of time the spiders and us were living together nicely. The spiders wouldn't come near us, and we would even tell the cats to leave them alone. Want to drive a cat crazy, let a fly loose in your home. The cat will do flips trying to catch the fly and you will think that the cat has flipped because you can’t see the fly. Anyway, after some time had passed we started noticing that the roaches were not in our home anymore. We paid $50.00 a month to kill roaches and then after we started leaving the spiders alone, the roaches disappeared. That was 3 years ago, we still don't have roaches. We still have the spiders, but as the Lord showed us things with His living creatures, we live in peace with them, instead of fear that the enemy has placed in our life. The bugs have purposes that we don't know. The enemy has done a little thing of having us kill the little things, so that we have a small part of death in our lives. He is about life, not death. You may have had the same effect that my friend had this afternoon, as a possibility of carrying this a little too far, but we have results. We not only have no bugs, we haven't wasted the $50.00 a month to get rid of them. We are blessed in our home. We saved over $1800.00 in not killing YHVH's creature. I said all that to say this. I have something my life that the Lord has shown me to do. I don't know if it is for everyone, but it is definitely for Renee and I. Instead of putting us down, you need to encourage us to go on, not try to talk us down or discourage us. You may have a similar thing that is going on in your life that no one understands why you are doing it, it could be anything. Is it my right to put you down because I don't understand it or it isn't my walk? No of course not. What my responsibility is to encourage you and your walk. If it bothers me, then I need to go to the Lord in prayer and figure out if you have something that I need to look at or I need to change to encourage you. We need to speak life not death. I do understand that there is some thing that we need to kill. But the Lord has put them here for us to survive on, chickens, cows, I know there is an argument in that, but that in itself is death or darts. Psalms 91 says that He will stop the fiery darts of coming against you. Well those words you speak against someone are darts. If you believe in something and I don't agree, then I still should encourage you to go for your dreams, unless it is going against the scriptures. What we have done is not against the scriptures, it isn't a sin, and it is a choice that we make. And we have the fruits for proof. We raised our standards! Encouragement or discouragement, it is up to you. The sooner you stop throwing darts, the sooner the darts will stop being thrown at you. BE Blessed! Richard