When I began writing blog posts on the Asbury Outpouring/Revival, I had hopes of finishing it up before last summer. Life happened (correction: a LOT of life happened) and here I am, one year after the Outpouring writing my final blog post on it.
This is the third draft I’ve begun for this final post. The other two just didn’t seem to be “it,” if you know what I mean.
It feels to me that the best way for me to conclude this little series is through a few stories of what I personally experienced during the Outpouring.
If you’re looking for jaw-dropping testimonies of what happened in Wilmore, Kentucky in February 2023, look elsewhere. None of this is jaw-dropping. It’s just regular stories of God moving in one individual’s life (as if moves of God are ever “regular”).
But one of my favorite things about hearing stories of the Outpouring is that each story, each testimony, is like a piece added to a beautiful mosaic of God’s handiwork.
So here are a few testimonies of what I witnessed God do during the Outpouring. Just small pieces added to a mosaic of a good and awesome God.
On the afternoon of February 8, 2023, I had heard that the Chapel service at Asbury University (right across the street from where I was studying at Asbury Seminary) had continued long past the scheduled end-time of 10:45. Some people I was talking to were saying that “revival” was happening; after all, Wilmore has a history of revivals. I, for one, thought it was much too early to deem it “revival.” Either way, there was no doubt that God was at work.
In the evening, I was walking on the treadmill in the seminary’s gym and talking on the phone with one of my closest friends. Three days before, I had just interviewed with a church and heard I was going to be receiving a job offer. I was excited, but nervous, especially because of all of the financial pieces of getting a “big boy job.” I shared with my friend about my nervousness for all the things that were about to happen.
My wife and I were desperately hoping to buy a home. In February 2023, the housing market was still very hot, especially in a growing area like the one the church is in. Buying a house itself seemed nerve-wracking enough. But buying a house multiple states away when they were going under contract in the amount of time it took me to drive to Alabama made buying a house seem impossible.
While I was on the phone with my friend, texts were coming in from my small group saying that some of the members were going to join worship at Asbury University. After I ended my call, I headed home, showered, and went to Asbury University. In my journal a couple days later, I described it as “a sweet spirit of intimacy, love, joy, peace, prayer, Scripture, worship, and reconciliation.”
I mentioned reconciliation because one of the odd things about Wilmore is that—though separated by a two-lane street—there had been an unspoken divide between the separate institutions of Asbury University and Asbury Seminary. Nothing major, but in my six years in Wilmore, it was certainly significant.
During the evening at Hughes Chapels, university students were invited to pray over seminary students. This itself was an answer to many peoples’ prayers, myself included.
A young lady named El (who told me she was a recent university grad but that she’d be glad to still pray for me) introduced herself. She asked what she could pray for. I vaguely told her graduation and my future. She asked if I had any plans after graduation (more than I could share with a complete stranger at the time, that’s for sure!). I told her I was planning on pastoring.
When she prayed for me, she asked God for several things, but specifically focused on providing the finances and even the right house for Haley and I to live in. I was in awe of God that through the prayers of a stranger, He was telling me: “I know your concern. I’ve got this.”
I never saw El again.
But El, on the crazy chance (and I’ve seen crazier) you’re reading this, I write this from a wonderful home in Wetumpka, Alabama that my wife and I purchased this summer.
Within days, thousands of people descended on our two-stoplight town of Wilmore, Kentucky. In many ways, it was overwhelming. Especially for the city’s sewage system.
I had the great privilege of being able to help in a few small ways throughout the Outpouring. Once or twice, I got to greet people as they entered into Estes Chapel, one of the seminary’s chapels that was livestreaming the worship service happening in Hughes Auditorium.
For several hours, every available worship space was filled to the brim with people (with the exception of the university’s large green, which itself became a worship space). Because of this, there were lines of people waiting to get into Hughes Auditorium and Estes Chapel. While folks were waiting for a seat to open up in Estes, I chatted with many of them.
I met people from many different states that came for a variety of reasons. I remember one particular lady who had waited in line to enter Estes after getting up early that morning and crossing through multiple states.
Just a few minutes after being seated in Estes Chapel, she frantically left. I kept my eye on her as she made phone calls and talked nervously with the man who was with her.
After several tense moments, she came up to me and asked me to pray for her. Her name was Tricia. She had recently gotten engaged and somewhere along the way, she had lost her engagement ring. She feared it fell off at a gas station and had become a valuable souvenir for the next traveler that refueled.
We prayed briefly (it’s hard to pray more than briefly when someone is anxious to get on the road). I have to admit, my prayer was more focused on “God, give her peace while her ring is lost” than “God, help her find her ring.”
As soon as I said “Amen,” Tricia was off, into a sea of strangers I knew I would never see again. But hours later, she was back standing at the exact place where we had prayed and wanted to share with me some exciting news. By the radiant smile on her face, I knew that what once was lost had now been found. She had called a gas station they stopped at along the way and a kind attendant went out to find the ring and was holding it until the couple made it back.
A theme that I’m just now realizing is that these three testimonies are all in some way connected to prayer, whether El’s prayer over me, my prayer over a lost ring, or a prayer time at the end of a Chapel service.
By the second day of the Outpouring, everyone in Wilmore knew what was happening on the University’s campus. We had a regularly scheduled Chapel service at the seminary and spent a significant amount of time praying for what God was doing across the street.
At the end of the service, as we were praying, I got an image in my head of the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37. I’ve had images pop into my head when praying several times before and Ezekiel 37 has been a passage that God has used to speak to me many times in the past, so I felt like He was inviting me into greater exploration of that passage.
After Chapel, I went to pick up my groceries (because some parts of life continue to go on amidst revival breaking out). I was thinking back on that image and all of a sudden, I began receiving what I guess was a vision.
I say “I guess,” because God has occasionally spoken to me in dreams and He’s spoken to me in pictures, but I have never had what I would consider a “vision” before. I had always assumed that visions were like putting on a VR headset and shutting out the rest of the world around you; and maybe they normally are. But this was different.
While I was still very cognizant of the world (good news for those in cars around me), in my mind’s eye (for lack of a better description), I was having a vision of something else. It’s like when you’re able to daydream about being on a Caribbean beach while still typing away at a report for work.
In the vision, I heard God, who was standing at one edge of the valley, ask if these bones could live. I knew what the biblical response was: “Lord, you alone know.” But for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Why couldn’t I say it?
I began walking around the Valley of Dry Bones, which was aptly named because I it was littered with skulls and bones. The weird thing was, though… I recognized some of the skulls.
The first one I came to was someone who had hurt me. We’ll call him A. He didn’t know that he had hurt me but over a period of several years of knowing him, his actions and inactions had led me to harbor significant amounts of resentment and anger towards him. A was one of those people I took the long way around just to avoid.
The second and third skulls I came to were two other people (B and C) who I knew had also been hurt by A. I figured that they were laying there, dead in the valley, because of wounds A had caused them. In fact, as I looked around the valley, I suspected it was filled by the bones of those who A had wounded with the ways he treated them.
I picked up A’s skull and, mustering up the courage to tell God something I was embarrassed to admit, I said: “I don’t want him to live.” And as I looked at B and C lying there, I thought, “If they live, how will people know about all the wreckage that happened here? How would they know who to blame?”
Out of hurt and frustration, I decided I needed to leave the valley. But I knew I couldn’t bear to go near God. So I began to leave the valley at the other edge. I turned my back to walk away from God.
But at the edge of the valley was one final skull. Another skull I recognized.
My skull.
In anger, I turned back to God as if to say, “How could you bring me here?! Why did you let me die here?!”
But before I could speak, I heard Him say: “Unless you allow me to bring these others to life, you will stay like that.”
Hearing that from God stung, like a healing ointment being smeared on an open wound.
So far, I’ve had a pretty great and easy life compared to most. But I’ve also been hurt deeply by several people who I should have been able to trust, A included. By the grace of God and a good therapist, I had done the hard work of being healed from some of these wounds. But not all of them. God used this vision to show me that I was still living out of unresolved trauma: the deep wounds of being hurt by A.
God invited me in the vision to let Him heal my wounds.
Mind you, deep wounds never go back to how they were. They become scars. But scars no longer bleed. Instead, they tell a story: I once was wounded, but now am healed.
Dr. AJ Swoboda, an author and teacher I admire, preached last school year at Asbury Seminary’s Chapel. He reminded us that, when responding to Thomas in his greatest time of despair, Jesus ministered out of his scars, the very place in which Jesus had suffered hurt.
By not letting God heal me of my hurt from A, I was not just bleeding out and bleeding on those around me. I was dry bones left in a Valley and, if I was honest with myself, I wanted to be left in the Valley. I wanted people to notice me. I wanted people to know the hurt I had endured.
When journaling about this vision during the Outpouring, I wrote the following:
“There’s a difference between sympathy and restoration. Sympathy is easy to receive. It replaces the absence of love with attention, and [love and attention] can feel quite similar. But restoration looks different. It looks like going down to Hell to be raised up again. It looks like taking on something more glorious than before. Some people you encounter will never know what you have been through. They will never know just how dry and brittle you were. But they will be blessed by your resurrected state more than was ever possible when you were in the Valley. They don’t have to know what you went through; you know… Jesus met many, many people after His resurrection. I wonder how many of them noticed His scars. I’m guessing not many. But when He needed to, with a person to whom He was intimately close to, He reached out His hands and showed His scars. Not as a way of seeking sympathy, but as a way of saying, ‘Look what God can do.’”
In the aptly titled sermon “Why We Need Revival” on the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Asbury University Revival, Dr. Steve Seamands taught me that Jonathan Edwards described revival as “the acceleration and intensification of the normal work of the Holy Spirit.”
Last year, throughout the month of February, I finally understood what that meant. God was at work in all kinds of ways, from prayers prayed to found rings to invitations to heal. Revival looks like Heaven invading earth. It looks like a people who are rejoicing that their King reigns. It looks like one life after another being changed in a way that only God could choose.
If I learned one thing from the Asbury Outpouring it’s this: We need revival. We won’t be ready for it when it comes. But it will be good because God is good.
I stopped avoiding A every time I saw him. I smiled at him. I spoke to him. And the last time I saw him, we actually shared a laugh together. Miracles come in all shapes and sizes.
On February 10, 2023, I ended my journal entry about the vision with this:
“So God, only You know if these bones can live. Would you raise up someone who can prophesy to these bones, that they may grow sinews and flesh? That Your breath can breathe life into them again? I want resurrection, Lord…”
May it be so, Lord. In Wilmore, Kentucky. In Wetumpka, Alabama. And in every corner of the world.
Amen.
This blog is the final blog in a series I entitled “After the Outpouring.” If you’d like to go back and read any of the previous articles, click on the titles below:
After the Outpouring: What Next?
After the Outpouring: “Now is the Right Time”
After the Outpouring: When Preferences Get in the Way
Hunter Bethea 
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