Awakening Quiet Fire

A personal prophetic history

I didn’t grow up in a charismatic household. In my youngest years, my mother was more into New Age spirituality, and my dad was a functional post-Christian agnostic. I say that because I think he suffered drift more than a conscious anti-Godness. But when they did come to faith, my dad had a series of dreams that played out like a movie. Those dreams would come to dominate the next decade of our family life.

Part of his response to this sudden and new belief that God truly does interrupt the ordinariness of things and speak to us was reaching out to an elderly prophet who lived a few hours south of us. She had recently published a book detailing all the same themes as Dad’s dreams, and it’s safe to say he had questions for her.

So, on one strange day, he packed his two young boys into the car, and we drove hours to have tea at a stranger’s house who’d had some dreams. As a young boy, I found it weird and awkward, but what would take place that day would mark my life forever.

She was lovely—strong, compassionate, and firm — with those eyes. The ones that look full of your own soul’s secrets if you look into them long enough. We had hot drinks and lamington, and then it happened.

After guiding us into her living room, full of old china and floral pillowcases, she sat my brother and me down, put a blank cassette tape in the cassette player (she wasn’t being cool or ironic; it was the ’90s!), pushed down the record and play button simultaneously, and proceeded to speak on behalf of God in the first person over each of us.

It was intense, it was holy, it was spot on.

As a nine-year-old, I was filled with awe. I could feel something moving through her and me. I knew that what she was saying was true. It became a moment that would define me, giving me a deep, perpetual hunger for the voice of God that has not for one moment left me. One line Avis spoke in those minutes rang especially loud in my heart: “Child, I am giving you the gift of discernment of spirits.”

And God was faithful to her words.

It began a few years later with vivid dreams about occultist behaviour at my neighbours house. Soon, I began waking to seeing things, and people, standing in my room. I started to think and see in images and pictures, and intuit things about people that other’s couldn’t pick up. Some of this began before I met Avis, but it only accelerated. I assumed it was normal, that everyone had these kinds of senses and experiences. They continued well into my teens.

When I went to stay at others people’s houses I would wake to see spirits in their bedrooms or living rooms. I almost never made it a whole night at someone’s house as a child due to the fear it caused me. Later as a young adult the same would happen, except now with spiders, snakes, describable figures, sounds in the house that others couldn’t hear.

I had a hyper-sensitivity, a wide open lens to all sorts of unseen things good and bad, and no one to help me make sense of it.

There was a lot of good too, I would have beautiful and profound experiences of God’s presence and began to gain confidence in sharing what I saw with others. Whatever I experienced of strange and unexplainable darknesses, I would encounter equally in wonderful senses, visions and experiences of God. Most were uplifting some were harrowing, some even began to come to pass in my life.

Yes yes, I know what you’re thinking and I did masonic curses broken at every prayer meeting. I declared the name of Jesus, anointed rooms, welcomed attempts at deliverance and anything else anyone offered. In the end I learned that what I was seeing wasn’t a curse, it wasn’t even necessarily attack, it was simply that I could see, and could see both the good and the troublesome. As I awoke to the gift of it and leaned in, I slowly let go of fear and became an intercessor. The dark visions ceased, new experiences of prayer and God’s kingdom ensued.

Then the dream-flood came.

In the early 2010’s I begun dreaming. Like, really dreaming. Often three, four or five times a night of apocalyptic, discerning and predictive dreams. Not all were from God, but many were. Sometimes they’d come to pass in a week, some years later other’s now. Some dreams were about vocation, some about others. In some, people I could describe to you in detail today would speak to me normally about things, as if it were two people in a cafe connecting. Sound weird to you? It was for me too!

Honestly, a lot of this made me hugely anxious. I saw things that made me feel physically sick for days about the world and about the church. I struggled to share what I was seeing with people cause it sounded weird. Your average Christian doesn’t really believe this stuff, they give you that glazed over look like you’re cuckoo when you open up about it. I grew a deep burden for the church and global issues, I prayed in tears constantly, I yearned for renewal.

It got complicated too. What happens when you see something that may come across negative about your church or a leader? How do you make sense of the incredibly intense senses you get in a gathering, about someone else, a teaching, about something that’s about to happen? I would see specific suffering in people’s lives while they were living in the mountaintop. Should I tell them? If so, how?

This spiritual sensitivity made me feel lonely, and more than a few times I didn’t handle sharing things well. For years I became hyper vigilant, fixated on the future, overwhelmed with guilt about sharing too much or not at all. I felt responsible for others actions, angry that I wasn’t listened too, lonely that I couldn’t find my place in the church and for the way I was treated.

At times I became paranoid of church leadership, judgemental about the church, painfully self-righteous. I even, for a while, left the church because I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy and blindness. Why couldn’t every one be as pure and God-seeing as me? Red flags? Big time.

But I had no one to help me, no one who’d been there before to help me along. Prophets are rare and I needed one whom I could talk to openly and without embarrassment or judgement. I don’t know if you noticed, but people look at you weird if you say ‘I think I may be prophetic’.

And anyway, how many churches have you been to that have a discipleship track for training prophets in their ministry? I’ve never been to a single one¹. Not even the prophetic church I went to. Most of the time they’re kept at arms length, not trusted, because they can be misunderstood. Partly too because most of the prophetic people I’ve met have been unfairly divisive and unhealthy and I mean that with total love and sympathy, as someone who has been that way myself.

I also think it’s not all their fault. Marginalisation can have negative effects.

I spent over a decade making a million mistakes before it began to take healthy shape for me, and much of that came from reading books - contemporary, some church history and especially the church fathers and the monastics. Because there, reading the mystics, contemplatives and monastics, I found people who were more prophetic than I could ever dream of being, and who live in perfect humility, wisdom and love for their neighbour.

Later, I would come across some amazing mentors and receive world class training (in my opinion anyway) in dream interpretation. Study, mentoring and working some of this out in a local church context began to give me a healthy frame for what it might mean to be a prophetic person and to thrive as one.

This may surprise you, but when I began Commoners Communion in 2017, it was to train and equip the church to hear God’s voice. I thought that meant dream interpretation, prophecy, and experiencing revelation. The Spirit, though, was longing first for lovers—for pray-ers, for a bride who longed for her Bridegroom again.

My own suffering softened me, and through it, I discovered something greater than dreams and visions: a God-beholding soul.

Now though, looking at the church post-2020, my heart breaks. It breaks because she’s so ready to move—so thirsty and longing—yet she has little to no prophets. Not at a community church level. I’ve watched public prophets sell themselves out to politics and do a lot of damage. I’ve watched charismatic leaders exposed for grave error, eroding the church’s trust in those who seemed “close to God.” That’s not even to mention the way conspiracy and prophecy have become almost impossible to separate in the social media sphere.

It feels to me like never before that we need a new community of seers—people who can help point us in the direction of God’s burning heart right now, this year, in this season. Prophets and prophetic people anchored in humility, love, wisdom, and gentleness, as well as visions, dreams, and fire for injustice.

We need a pathway to help prophetic people avoid wasting a decade spinning out like I did. We need to disciple them into the most mature, loving, and on-fire people in our communities. We need to eradicate the pervasive loneliness in our community.

We also need pastors who are unafraid of them—who have a real and tangible framework for incorporating this gift and office functionally into the private and public ministry of the church. I’m aware that’s going to require some work. I’m here for it if you are.

I’ve never shared this publicly before, and I’m nervous to do it. But I am in the hope that if you’ve had experiences like these and more, if you’re on the margins with a burning heart for Christ, His people, and the world—then you’re invited to come home. Come grow and make sense of the gift you are. Come recommit to the journey of taking your place among the community of God. Come light a fire in the world.

If that’s you, and you want to say yes to what may be the Spirit’s invitation in this moment, I invite you to join me for Quiet Fire: Thriving as a Prophetic Person. It’s an eight-week course inspired by a biblical and historical vision of the gift, my own experiences, and prophetic wisdom I’ve gathered along the way.

I’ll teach, we’ll share the road with each other, and develop this vital and exciting gift for this moment.

God is always after the heart of His beloved. Why not join me to burn with the quiet fire that has consumed the great saints and prophets for thousands of years? The deep, lasting, and true fire that energizes a life of revelation and love—and which, when fueled with the prophetic gift, sets the world around us aflame.

For as St. John of the Cross said, “The flame of love, when it is most vehement, is the quietest.”

Come burn with me.

Much love,
Strahan

1. Yes, I’m aware of some very charismatic or pentecostal churches. But many of those came with lots of other quirks culturally, theologically, spiritually, too.