Episode #56 (Transcription)

	Listen in Shulamite Podcast (Year TWO Collection) The complete second year of MP3 podcasts. 51 Episodes on 2 CDs

With Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow

(M)  Well, I’m going to read from your file, “Single Eye” just as Joan did, John.  There’s a whole lot on the website that has been written about light, and I had forgotten how much we went into light.  But here’s what you say; “Light that strives with darkness is not light.  It is plainly darkness.”  I’m going to read more than a zinger, some things that could be three or four zingers.  “Though light knows when the presence of darkness is there, its preoccupation can never be with darkness.  The moment your eye is cast from light to darkness, your worship has shifted from light to darkness.  Even a momentary glance away from light is a shifting of your allegiance and heart devotion.”  Does it get you what God gave you in the past?  “The true Light came into the world and swallowed darkness on the cross.  Darkness is real no more, if we refuse to validate it through entanglement.”  That‘s a lot about focus, isn’t it?  But that’s some of the things that meant a lot to me to go back and remember.
(J)  You know, I don’t just write something.  I birth it really, you know, and God usually works it out.  With that “Single Eye,” not many people know, but when I wrote that, just after I wrote that, my eye was struck.  God was working the single eye into my person, but He did it in a very demonstrative way.  And my eye was struck and literally my eye just kind of shifted and drifted over to my right eye…did this.  It shifted and drifted over to the right and I couldn’t see.  And so then, I went to the eye doctor and like what is wrong, what is wrong, what is wrong?  I ended up having to put a patch on my eye for a couple of weeks, so I had a single eye.  So that really means a lot to me because God worked it out under my life.  He was like, “Let me give you the message.  Now let Me work it out.”  You know?  And so usually these articles…  yours and mine, they’re not just knowledge.  It’s not just head stuff.  This is things that have been worked out.  Your books have been banged out in life.  Your teaching has been really formed and fashioned in Christ’s life through your form and brought out.  And so this website for me is life.  It’s a journal of life lived with Christ.  And that’s why I think it’s so impacting and so awesome and why it’s so wonderful.  It’s because it’s not just a knowledge base.  It’s a life base.  And it’s not a life about us.  It’s a life about Him and how He has worked Himself into our life.  And so I’m just really excited about this website coming out.  And I’m real excited about, you know, to have it be able to be more navigatable and be able to search easier in it.
(M)  Which is something I have wanted for a long time.
(J)  And that’s exactly what I was going to say.  Your goal was, you didn’t want a long list of E-zines that you had to go into each E-zine.  Well, we’ve worked it, worked it, worked it trying to figure out how do we get it so that there’s depth into this website?  And how do we get it so that you can see it, access it.  Because, you know, with 1,600 plus pages, there’s content, ok?  But how do you access it?  And you can go into the archives and you can see all the articles.  And you can go into the E-zines and you can see all the E-zines.  But now what we’ve done is, and what we’re excited about, is the fact that you can search anything through topics.  And not only can you search it through topics, but you can also search it through areas in topics.  And then you can even search topics, words, and areas.  So say that wanted to search out the word Daniel.  You’re looking for something on Daniel.  Say you wanted Daniel and prayer.  The topic was prayer.  So you said the word search Daniel, the topic search prayer and then you only wanted to do it in Manna.  You didn’t want the e-zine.  You didn’t want the articles.  You didn’t want any of the books.  All you wanted was Manna.  You could find that, pin point that very very easily by doing that quick search.  All that search would be is two clicks and typing in the word Daniel and clicking the word submit and it would bring up every reference to Daniel, that it was a topic of prayer, and that it was in the Manna.  So in this we’re hoping that it really will make it very very simple for you.  The whole site is…  Our thrust has been that we really want it to be a place of peace, that we wanted it to be peaceful.  You didn’t feel like a barrage of…  You know sometimes you go to some websites and it feels like a circus.  And that’s ok, but that’s not what we wanted to portray.  We wanted to portray His life and His peace.  And so in this I’m believing that the site is going to show that through the topics and through the searches and through everything like that…  You can go to this website and you can go the front page and every single morning the Manna of that morning will be there right on the front page.  This is a wonderful thing.  You know, you’ll get the Manna as we’ve done it before where you have been able to get it into your e-mail, which is sometimes more convenient.  But you’ll also be able to go to the site and be able to see it.  The podcast will automatically be there.  You can go to the Shulamite site it will take you straight to the podcast that is current.  So there’s a number of things that… And those two, the e-zine, the Manna, and the podcasts are really on the front page come up to the fore front.  We’ve broken everything down into sections also.  We’ve broken it down into you and what you’re saying, ok?  And then we’ve broken it down into us as a ministry and as a body.  Then we’ve broken it down into what our vision, what our goal and what our life is.  Then there’s three sections:  Read, listen and shop.  If you wanted to buy something, one of the CD series, or one of the books, you go to the shopping section.  If you wanted to read something you would go to the read area.  You could read a Manna.  You could read a Fresh Bread, which is just a new article, or you could read an e-zine.  Or you could go to the listen section and you could go to a podcast.  Or you could go to and access the CD series that we’re selling.  Let me hear your heart on this.  Where is your heart, because this is really your ministry and this is what the Lord has really invested in to bring forth your revelation of Him?  So what…  Tell me what is this doing for you? 
(M)  Well, the discovery of all that’s there and hearing it has really become a testimony of what He has put in us.  This website is a testimony of who Christ is and what He’s revealed to us, both corporately and individually.  So it’s sort of given me a resurrection to invest in the website because I kinda had lost sight of really how rich it is, John.  And it is birthed through my life, but it is not me.  And I’m seeing that in a fresh way that this is Christ and He has been most interested in this website and has established and sustained it and given the people to do so.  I see why He’s had a…  I can be bold to say He’s had a voice here, sort of a fresh voice, things that will be read from 2001 are just as fresh today and the things you wrote when you first began to come are just as fresh and penetrating today as they were then.  So only the Holy Spirit can cause something to be fresh that is old.
(J)  Isn’t that the mark of having it be from God, because anything we say, you know, it dries up and it’s, it’s…
(M)  It’s stale.
(J)  It’s stale and it’s fickle, you know?  It’s here today and it’s gone tomorrow.
(M)  It’s a fad.
(J)  It is a fad, but you know something?  The life of Christ…  It’s eternal.  It’s the same as it was at the beginning as it is at the end.
(M)  So I kinda have a childlike wonder after three days of working at this.  Even though we’re weary, it is astounding to all of us, who’ve been together a long time, some of us longer than others.  But to all of us it has been an astounding discovery of what God has put amongst us.  It’s given me a fresh kind of resurrection to…
(J)  Over the next couple weeks the website is going to unfold.  We’re going to do the official launch.  I believe it’s on the 9th.  But actually we may not have everything up because it’s so much.  And so it may take a little while for it all to be up there, but we’re going to put a lot on there and have it ready for the launch.  And then in the weeks to come there’ll be more.  So we’d like to invite you to come to Shulamite.com and see the new look and the new website .  And we’re real excited to hear your feedback and comments.  And we’d like to hear how you feel about it, what you feel about it, and if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear those as well. 
(M)  And I don’t know that it will describe this, but on the home page the picture there is of the Shulamit Fern in Israel by the beautiful River Dan that we discovered a couple of years ago.  John took some beautiful pictures of it.  And there will be more and more development of the website artistically as well as in the materials that will be put on there.  It has a beautiful fresh look, just like that River Dan that bubbled and was such a powerful stream up in the head waters before you hit the Jordan.  But the Shulamit Fern is what you photographed there, and that’s called the Maidenhair Fern here.  So that is our sort of logo… that photograph.  But that won’t tell on there what exactly what it is.  So I wanted to be sure that that information got out to a few people anyway.  But I thank you for the vision, John.  God gave you the timing and the vision, that it was time to do this.  We needed a fresh fresh look and I think we needed a fresh everything, a fresh look at it, a fresh presentation of it.  And that’s happening.
(J)  I think we also needed a fresh going over it in ourselves.  We needed to look at it again and to see what was really there.
(M)  Yeah.  We needed to see what He’s invested here and why He seems to bless it.  So we did.  We needed to go through it again.  I think it sort of bound us together a little bit.  Don’t you, as a group?  So it’s been a life experience to do this tedious work.
(J)  Jennifer, that you heard, we’re really excited.  She’s going to be able to come back up and she’s going to be able to continue to work with it with me.  And there will be other volunteers that will be coming to help input the stuff, to make it available for you.  So over the next week and weeks, so to speak, we’d love you to come and just see how it’s evolving and what’s coming out, the fresh things that are coming to light again, so to speak.  You know, they’ve been in the basement as you said.
(M)  Well, I occasionally get letters from people who have just discovered the website and they have the enthusiasm that we’ve sort of not lost, but needed to recover, I’ll say.  And to discover what the voice of Christ is among us, it’s quite amazing.
(J)  Well, one of my favorite messages that you did was the “Consider the Lilies.”  And that really, if you didn’t search for it, that would be lost, you know?  And it would be buried.  And so I’m real excited about that too.  Things that are real precious down there and that have been our favorites over the years, that they’ll all of a sudden be coming the fore front and you’ll be able to see them.
(M)  The beauty of this website is, that we wanted, is it’s simple.  Its format is available on every page, but it is simple and it’s not filled with words.  If you want writings, they’re there.  But it isn’t, as you say, bombarding you with neon lights.  It’s a very quiet place to come.  One of the things the Lord showed me years ago is that our website is a place.  It’s not just an electronic website.  It is a place to go with us and with the Lord.  So we welcome you.  Do come.