Calling, Covering & Contending

In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Diana Dietz. Diana is a full-time volunteer intercessor for the Worship Department at Gateway Church in Dallas Texas.

Yes! Her full time job is to pray for the pastors, leaders and teams who lead worship at Gateway! Listen in and be encouraged to step in faith, hear his voice and see the beauty of redemption.

A Call to Intercession

Gina:

I’m honored to have you. I’m excited to chat with you. We just met five minutes ago, Loisa, our mutual friend, connected us. You are an intercessor. You help with prayer for the worship department at Gateway Church in Texas, which is a huge church with enormous worship ministry. Loisa said you also do care for the teams and the people. Can you share a little bit about that? What is your role? How is God using you in this place?

Diana:

It’s always changing, first of all, with Gateway being such a big organization that morphs into different things, depending on where I am. I’m a full-time volunteer, that’s a little bit unusual at Gateway, and there’s only a few of us around. I have my own budget and an office and an administrator, they’ve been very kind to me.

My supervisor is David Thompson. I worked with him in the content department as a volunteer, and then when he moved over to worship, he invited me to come and be one of the four leads of the department and my area is prayer. Once we got into the worship department, we really realized that there were people on our staff and our volunteers in our organization that needed to have an inner care.

I do a lot with that individually, and then also with departments at Gateway with campus staff we get invited in. I have a team, and we get invited in to do prayer and prophetic ministry, healing, and deliverance, however The Holy Spirit would lead us.

Gina:

Can we just talk a little bit about your journey to step into volunteering full-time? That is pretty unusual, and some people would probably go, “Wow, you’re crazy. Why would you do that?” Can you talk a little bit about that? I know we’re going to talk about prayer in a minute, but I would love for you to share your journey.

Diana:

When my family and I arrived at Gateway, we were pretty broken in all the areas that could be broken, both individually and as a family. We started working and we started walking through what we would call “our spiritual boot camp season”, where anytime the door at Gateway was opened, we were there.

At that point, when we got to Gateway, there was something going on almost every night of the week, and then five services on the weekend, which had Equip classes during this time. We would come to church, go to classes, we started to get healed, we went through freedom ministry, (now we call it Kairos ministry, which is two days of inner healing). We really started to get healed individually and as a family.

Prior to that, I was a corporate troubleshooter, I found and fixed problems in organizations, and I even owned a few businesses. I felt, as we were getting healed, that God asked me to volunteer full-time at Gateway, because they’d been so good to us and our family. During those first couple of years, I would just pray eight hours a day for Gateway.

I did that for a few years, with my husband’s blessing. He felt that was the same calling, that it was a season of full-time prayer for Gateway. Then I started to get invited into different areas of prayer, and helped to start different areas of prayer at Gateway. My husband and I, again, prayed about it and really felt like we wanted to offer full-time service. That was what God was asking me to do.

And from that, I volunteered in about 14 different departments in the organization, mostly coming in and serving whatever area they needed help in, but always with prayer and prophetic emphasis. I really started to fall in love with the staff, and see how much of what Gateway was called to, and how each staff person had all these unique and beautiful giftings that most of them had spent a lifetime acquiring. I got to see how God was putting it all together.

With that love for the staff, people’s hearts would start opening up, and that’s where the staff care part came from. But also, in the middle of that, I really felt like asking, “Do I need to go back to work full time? Do I need to still continue doing this?” This was about October of 2019, and I felt the Lord say, “Do you want people to pay you? Or do you want Me to pay you?” And I said, “Of course, I would love You to pay me.”

Shortly after that, someone gave me a check for $15,000 and said, “God just wants you to know, He really has favor on what you’re doing.” This was a person I didn’t even know. Then a couple months after that, someone gave me a Mercedes convertible. I needed a new car, but I wasn’t expecting that!

From there, people just do that, or He comes in unusual ways. We’ve tried to steward that well on our side as a family, and make sure we’re giving out where it needs to go. But also my prayer has always been “Enough for ourselves in every good work.” We feel like we’re in a season of that now, but it’s coming way different than we had anticipated.

Prayer is a Conversation

Gina:

I love your story! And there’s a couple of things I want to highlight. I think there’s a misnomer for a lot of people in the church, that are for lack of a better term of lay people, people who attend church.You read verses like “Rejoice, always, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks.”

You have this image of a monk on a rooftop somewhere that can pray without ceasing. It brings up a picture of something very unattainable. Or if you say the word “intercessor”, they think of some little, gray haired, old, kind of strange woman, hiding in a backroom in the church basement, somewhere on their knees, and that’s the intercessors.

But here you are, you and your family came broken, (in your words), and you receive all of this healing. You feel compelled to give back, and you ask the Lord, “What would You have me do?” And He just says, “Pray.” It’s not a lightning bolt from heaven, or two seminary degrees and training through all these programs, it was you as a daughter of the Lord saying “Yes”, and then being obedient with that.

That’s pretty awesome. What did that look like? I know this sounds a little too practical, but it’s important for people to hear. What did it look like for you to pray 8 hours a day? What was that like for you? Was that hard?

Diana:

Not at all. It has been a desire of mine for a long time to spend a season of just praying. Raising kids and starting companies and all the different things that I did, I still would pray, but not eight hours a day. Considering it my full-time job is so much easier than I ever thought it would be. I get up every morning and I swim. My 20 minutes driving there, and my hour at the pool, and 20 minutes back, already some time in prayer.

I sing in the Spirit a lot. Even when I’m shopping or wandering around, I can be singing in the Spirit, and it’s easy because people just hear melodies or songs and it’s not uncomfortable for anyone. I do that a lot. During that season I did that a lot, walking the neighborhood and just singing and praying.

I did spend a lot of time laying and kneeling before the Lord, and that was a few hours a day, every day. Prayer is conversation, but not always out loud. Those eight hours, some are just quiet thinking about Scriptures, letting my mind be saturated. I listened to the Bible on tape a lot. It could even be just listening to the Scriptures and interacting with them.

Gina:

I love that you said “conversation”, because I think a lot of times people don’t have a grid for that. It can be thinking about Scripture and then just saying, “Lord, I don’t understand that. What does that mean?” Or saying, “I have a hard time with that.”, and actually being real with Him and letting Him respond. It’s responding to Him and letting him respond to you.

Diana:

It does take time. Even though we’re talking about how simple it is, and it is simple, but there are at least ten “Holy No’s” that I have to say, to be able to say that one Yes to the Lord. There are a lot of Holy No’s that have to be said to live a lifestyle of prayer, and a lot of that was in silence, even though I know a lot of people think you have to talk.

The Posture of Prayer

Gina:

“You have to have some eloquent speech.” Or “You have to pray like that pastor.” I’ve had people actually say to me, “Oh, I can’t pray the way you do Gina.” I have friends, they are a couple, Justin and Summer. He’s a prophetic pastor, he’s been to seminary, and he’s also a creative, and a deep well of wisdom. When he prays, sometimes you’re like, “I don’t even understand what he just said, but okay.” It’s deep and wide.

Then his wife, Summer, is just super simple, straight forward. She prays very simple prayers, but there is equal power, equal depth. Jesus responds equally because they’re His kids, who He’s uniquely equipped and gifted. It’s not about the words. It’s often the posture, that’s most important.

Diana:

It’s mostly the posture. Everyone is so uniquely made. I would fall more on the side of your friend Summer. I am really simple and I’m very childlike with my prayers, and it’s a big deal to me. One of my gifting areas is strategy. When I’m alone with the Lord, or when I’m in a group of intercessors that have been praying people for a long time, there is a different way that I pray.

When I’m leading a public prayer, it’s a real strategy to be as simple as I can. One of my favorite compliments, even here at Gateway Church, was one time I was leading a prayer time, and afterwards, someone came up and said, “Hey, I heard you were one of the big prayer people at Gateway, and then I heard you pray, and I thought, “I can do that too!”” That’s the whole point!

Gina:

I’m so glad you said that! One of the things that I’m so passionate about, is releasing God’s people to step into and believe their identity, which is: they are a son, or a daughter. In Ephesians, it says we are seated at the right hand with Jesus in heavenly places, high above every principality, power, spiritual wickedness in heavenly places, that we have authority through Jesus.

Jesus told the disciples to heal the sick and raise the dead, and then He says, “When I’m gone, you will do these things, and even greater.” People disqualify themselves. They go to church and say “Well I just sell insurance, or I’m just a stay-at-home mom, and those are the spiritual people. That’s the pastor, and he’s got a degree, and that’s the worship leader or the leader of the prayer ministry.”

But what I think is so powerful about your story, is you were a woman who was in the business world doing your thing. You’re a mom, and you’re a wife. And then you felt compelled by the Lord to pray, and you took a risk to say yes to that. In saying yes to that, the Lord is blessing you, He’s providing for you, and He’s meeting your needs.

I think that’s such a powerful encouragement for people to pay, and to listen to what the Lord might be prompting or nudging or encouraging. I’m not saying it’s prayer. Who knows what it is, maybe it’s to share your faith with your neighborhood, maybe it’s to start a single moms group to encourage single moms, or whatever it might be.

What would it look like if you just took that first step of faith and trust that God’s going to meet you there? He’s going to equip you. He’s going to give you strength. He’s going to give you the words. He’s going to give you the provision. If you have to step away from provision in other places, that’s really powerful, and that you don’t need to have three degrees, twelve trainings, and have been through this course to be qualified. It’s so easy to feel unqualified. We need to step into what really is biblical normal.