A Home for Sanctuary House of Prayer – Part 1

I want to share a little about our journey that has brought my husband and I to Sanctuary House of Prayer and what God is currently doing in our midst…

Before I met my husband Joe, I knew nothing about the International House of Prayer (IHOP) and was simply enjoying life in Calgary, Alberta where I had been living for over four years.  I loved Jesus, was going to school for Computer Programming, volunteered part-time at my church, and figured I would probably stay there forever?  Then my life got turned upside down when this handsome, tall, charming man entered my life and swept me off my feet with poetic, romantic words from the Song of Songs, wooing my heart with words about my Bridegroom Jesus that I never thought I’d hear coming from any man!  To find someone who was this in love with Jesus felt like a direct answer to my prayers and it wasn’t long before I was head over heels in love.

During our dating months, I began to learn that Joe had learned all this wonderful language about Jesus as our Bridegroom from teachings he had listened to by Mike Bickle at IHOP and my first personal experience came when he bought me Mike Bickle’s 20 session series on the Song of Songs.  From then on, I was hooked, and soon began to learn all about intercession, harp and bowl worship & prayer, the End-Times, the Bridal Paradigm, and more.  Joe and I both knew that this was something we wanted to be a part of!

After we got married, we seriously considered moving to Kansas City so that Joe could do an internship at IHOP, but we felt like the Lord told us to stay put.  We then got involved at our church in a leadership role for the prayer ministry of the young adult service and we started to implement anything and everything we could from IHOP’s harp and bowl worship and prayer model.  We loved it and were experiencing some really enjoyable times of prayer!  But we longed for more…

In January of 2006, as I was reading the blog of an old friend from highschool (Kristi), I discovered that her husband(Shane) was going to become a full-time intercessory missionary as they launched Sanctuary House of Prayer back in Winnipeg, Manitoba!  Joe and I were so excited just to hear about another young, married couple with the same desires and passions and that there was going to be a house of prayer in Canada!  We had not heard of anyone else doing anything like this in Canada and were simply happy for them.  As we made plans to visit my family for my dad’s birthday that March, we knew we just had to get together for coffee with Shane & Kristi to chat with them about their new endeavor.  When we met up at Cora’s for brunch, we immediately connected and felt like there was finally someone speaking our language!  They encouraged us in what we were doing back at our church and we encouraged them in what they were doing and we left that coffee date not thinking much of it.

To be continued…

(You can read Part 2 here)