What does it mean to intentionally “dwell” in God’s presence? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Teea Martin and Priscilla Conner. Listen as they share the story of gathering women in Teea’s home to intentionally be in God’s presence, the significance of this gathering and the surprising places it led. What could Jesus be inviting you into?
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Getting Alone With God
Gina:
Well, Priscilla and Teea, Hi. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Priscilla and I go way back when you lived in California. You guys are both in Minnesota right now. “Cill”, as I so affectionately call her, and I led worship together for a lot of years. We had a lot of fun at the church we were at together in California until she moved away and abandoned us and just left.
Priscilla:
I ruined it all!
Gina:
All of it. So many things. That’s a whole other podcast. We could talk about the trauma of abandonment. Just kidding, just kidding! So you moved to Seattle and then you ended up in Minnesota. Teea and you are friends. Teea and I just met about a week ago.
Priscilla:
Which was long overdue!
Gina:
Long overdue. So we had a conversation recently, Priscilla you called to ask if you guys could use Dwell, and just started sharing some things about what God’s doing in and through you guys. Teea and I got a chance to have a conversation and it was so powerful, we just needed to talk on the podcast.
People need to hear your story, because one of the reasons why I do this podcast, and one of the reasons why I do it the way I do it, is because I want people to hear testimonies and stories of normal people – who may not ever write a book or lead a ministry or be a quote unquote Christian influencer, – but who are giants in the Kingdom and who have great influence.
Because that demonstrates that you are daughters. I’m a daughter of the king. We are all sons and daughters, and the Lord has called us and gifted us and equipped us and given us authority to bring his Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.
If we as believers could believe, trust, and know that – the things that He’s given me, exactly where I’m planted, exactly where he has me and my family, my home, my community, and my job – God could use me to bring His love and His presence to those around me.
So I am excited for you to share your stories, your friendship, your journeys with Jesus, and then the cool things that God’s doing now. Wherever you want to start, I’m down for all of it.
Priscilla:
Well, thanks for having us on your spectacular podcast. it’s a wonderful podcast and we’ve been blessed by it, so thank you. Tia and I met probably four years ago, through women’s ministry. I don’t even remember how that all happened.
Teea:
I don’t remember either! We’ve talked about this before, I feel like I’ve never not known you. I don’t remember a time you came into my life. So if it really has only been four years, that’s really crazy to me, because I just feel like we’ve known each other forever.
Priscilla:
Yeah. I was actually counting the years for us, Gina. Over 15 years we’ve known each other!
Gina:
Isn’t that crazy?
Priscilla:
It really is. I don’t feel like either of us are old enough to say that, and to be adults even back then.
Gina:
Right?
Priscilla:
You were at one of my child’s births.
Gina:
Yep. I was there when Ellie was born.
Priscilla:
Yeah. So Tia and I met and since then we’ve been friends. A year ago she felt prompted to get a group of women together for a very specific reason. There are very specific people that He put on our heart. From that it’s been a real life altering experience, and it’s been a year of growing so much cheaper in our relationships with the Lord, because we have learned to hear from Him through what Teea got us together to do last summer.
Gina:
So how did God work in you through that? Can you share that journey?
Teea:
Well Gina, when we were talking about it last week, it was kind of the first time I’d backtracked far enough to figure out where that came from. I think it originally started from just going away on weekends by myself, or with my best friend, to be alone with the Lord. Not a very typical girl’s weekend at all. Just literally, intentional and intimate time with Jesus, our Bibles and our journals and tons of quiet time. We would just sit next to each other. We weren’t even discussing things.
I started off a couple times a year, then it was three, then four times a year. The more that I did that, I felt like we were starting to find the flow of “How do you be alone with the Lord?” It’s so countercultural to what we’re used to. You’re used to going-going-going, nonstop. Even relaxing weekends are planned and focused. There is so much planning in life, and it’s the opposite to sit still and just be with the Lord.
He calls us His friend. Well, I don’t want to just rattle off a list of desires to my friend and then walk away. I want to get to know you. I want to know the sound and the texture and the tone and the vibration and the heavenly frequency of Your voice. I want to know that’s not just for direction in life, or just for a Holy Spirit goosebump moment, but because I want to know you.
So anyway, I started doing these retreats, and every time I was coming back, I would have the strong desire to bring others into it. It was so refreshing for me and gave me vision and clarity from the Lord on what I was doing in life. I kept this list of names that He would put onto my heart in my phone.
Inviting Others Into Listening
Teea:
I thought I was going to have a retreat weekend, but stuff kept getting canceled. Covid got tossed in there. Remember that? Priscilla had everything planned and it didn’t happen. If we would’ve done that, I don’t think last summer would’ve happened, so it would’ve been different. Long story short, all our plans for this retreat kept falling through.
Finally in the spring time about last year, I felt like the Lord brought clarity to it, that we are supposed to do a group. It’s supposed to be in our home. It’s going to be through the summer and we’re not opening up a book or a Bible study. It wasn’t going to be a traditional small group thing.
We are going to take some of these practices that really are not revolutionary, but just aren’t practiced all the time. We’re going to provide a space of intimacy. So, I invited these people that had been floating around on this list on my phone for a couple years, and it was this amazing group of women. There ended up being eleven of us.
I thought, “Oh Lord, that’s kind of a large small group.” And He’s like, “Yes.” It was cool because most of us knew each other’s faces, or had served maybe in women’s ministry together, but almost nobody in the room knew each other well. The women just came with this posture of hunger and desire for intimacy, and I had set it up like that.
I shared with them, I was like, “Listen, this is going to be different. If you’re going to say ‘yes’ to this, prayerfully consider it first. Then if you’re going to say yes to it, understand what it is you’re walking into.” The layout of the summer was what we called “Elevate.”
The whole point was to elevate our faith from wherever we’re at, no matter the maturity level, the experience, the knowledge, how big or small or wide or narrow it is, just from wherever we are… we’re going to elevate our faith through sharing testimonies with each other.
We’re going to elevate our community by not necessarily knowing each other’s husbands and kids and what you do for a living, but by going into a Holy space with the Lord and having this sweet intimacy with each other when you do it. So elevate our faith community and elevate our prayer life all through intentionality.
So we gathered and we worshiped, and every week a couple of the women would share some testimony in their life, and then we would sit with the Lord and talk to Him individually and spend time in prayer. It was so good.
Priscilla:
That’s exactly what we did. Teea would provide us with questions to ask God.
Teea:
Holy Spirit would provide us with questions. Sometimes He didn’t give them until minutes before you all walked in, but He always brought them.
Priscilla:
I remember you saying that when I would talk to you midweek, you’d be like, “I have no idea what we’re doing next week.” We would show up and you’re like, “I just got it.” So like Teea said, it was very intentional. We walked into her home, she opened up her home, which is lovely. There would be worship music playing. It wasn’t “Walk in, grab a drink, how’s your week?” The small talk didn’t happen.
And like she said, we didn’t know each other’s husband’s names or kids’ names. After all of those weeks, we still didn’t know everybody’s husbands and kids’ names because that really was not what we were there to do. We were there to truly get to know the Lord. So we walked in and you were welcomed with worship music, and right into this holy place.
Then, when once we got to our time together to dive in and just have this personal solo time with the Lord, she did provide us with questions and promptings and that was so powerful. I just hadn’t done anything like that before. To take that time to intentionally spend with the Lord asking Him questions and then waiting and listening.
And waiting some more. Tia prompted us to write, to journal all of the things that were being downloaded to us. From words, to colors, to smells, to memories. To whatever is popping up in our brain, and to be confident that it’s something the Lord wants us to be thinking about.
Teea:
The Word says very clearly — He’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us, and we can hear His voice. I think we doubt that. We think, “Oh, only pastors or leaders or missionaries, the special people hear the voice of God.” and that is just not true. That’s how it works. He’s talking to all of us.
So if we get that out of our heads, and we can all of a sudden recognize, “Oh, that’s You.” instead of pondering our thoughts. It’s the five minutes where nobody’s bothering me, and I’m thinking and pondering all these things. Well, instead of pondering your thoughts with yourself, ponder them with the Lord. Right?
Gina:
Yeah. That’s good.
Priscilla:
It takes away the discerning of “Was that me or was that Him? Is that me or Him?” When you’re really communicating intentionally with Him. It takes that uncertainty away.
Practicing Intentionality
Gina:
Well first of all, you guys are speaking my love language. I beat this drum constantly and I’m a little bit of a broken record. Teea going back to you, intentionally getting away with Jesus. I think that is just such a foreign concept. It’s a lost thought or practice or idea – that intentionally being with Jesus.
It doesn’t even have to be a weekend, it could be an afternoon. When I teach my prayer class even, I ask people, “Do you worship apart from Sunday morning with all of your friends? Do you ever close your curtains and in your living room, dance, cry, pray, get on your knees, get on your face? Do you go for a walk on the beach with the Lord? Do you ever intentionally do that?
It is hard and it is countercultural. There’s so much pressure now, and we don’t know how to be still. There’s this really disturbing statistic now, because I work with a couple of ministries and their digital ministries, and you’re dealing with digital marketing and all this stuff.
The human attention span has dwindled to like five seconds. The newest research has come out, it’s dwindled even farther. So when they’re talking about social media or marketing, it’s like you need to grab people in seconds. And you realize that that’s translating into every other area of our life.
Can we have a conversation with someone without picking up our phone or right? And doing 30 other things? Can we sit? We can’t even do it with each other, let alone with the Lord. But the sweetness of going, because the kindness of Jesus is that He will meet us as far as we can come.
If we’re like, “Okay, I’ll come here.” He’s like, “Awesome, great, let’s meet here.” You know? I mean that’s who He is. Once you taste and see that He’s good, then that creates that wonder, and you just come a little more and a little farther and like, “Okay, let’s spend a little more time.” Like you said you started with one weekend away and then you did it a couple of times and then “Oh!” once a quarter.
Then you know that you start to recognize His voice. Going back to like the 1 Thessalonians 5, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks. We look at those things and kind of go “Rejoice, pray without ceasing. I’m not a monk.” But it’s that invitation to relationship in communion, which is what Jesus demonstrated.
His life was a demonstration of this constant relational connection, interdependence and walking with the Lord — “I only do what I see my father doing.” He’s in that constant place of communion. Then when He prays for us in John 17, “Lord, I pray for these, but the disciples that are come that they would be in me the way I’m in you… that they would be one with us just like you and I are one… that they would have the glory you gave me.”
Like those are radical things, that verse is hard to read because there’s a lot of “them” and “you and me” and “we and them”. So you kind of read it and gloss over it. But when I teach my prayer class, I actually have people go back through and put their name everywhere it says “they”.
And suddenly it’s like Jesus is praying, Lord, I want Gina to be in me the way I’m in you. Lord, I want Gina to have you the glory you gave me. Like what?! I’ve got chills right now. That’s the invitation. So I just love that you first of all saw that Teea, and that you just took it upon yourself. I say all the time, it’s not dependent on a pastor or a church program, or I need some other very spiritual person to do this for me.
No, the invitation is for me, that Jesus died for me and for you and my husband and my kids. The invitation is for every one of us to step through that torn veil and to enter into that communion with Him. Then Priscilla, I love your description of, really the table that was set. It’s like Teea set a table and created an atmosphere that just gave room and permission. Right?
So whether you walked in and this was totally foreign to you, or it was a little foreign to you, or it was comfortable for you, like it was okay, it was okay to be wherever you were in that space. There was that presence and that permission as soon as you walked in. Which is really sweet and powerful.
Teea:
I think it’s such a beautiful way to gather as sisters and friends, to be with the Lord. We talk about it all the time. Like He is here, He is with us, He is present, yet we gather and we talk about Him, but He’s not here.
Gina:
Yeah, I have a friend Roy Cochran, and he’s a pastor to pastors and leaders, and just a total papa in the faith. He has a ministry called “Third Chair Ministries.”
Teea:
That’s funny, I was just talking about this a couple weeks ago. I’m like, “You pull up a chair for Him.”
Gina:
That’s what his mentor did. The first time he saw him, he was an elderly gentleman and they were meeting in his kitchen and he pulled up another chair and Roy was just like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” And he’s like, “It’s for Jesus.” Roy kind of laughed and thought that was weird and awkward. But the point of it is that the chair represents the reminder that the Lord is in our midst. He’s in this conversation.
We don’t want to talk about Him in the third person, like He’s way over there. Right. We don’t want to talk with Him and bring Him into the conversation because He is already a part of it. That was such a beautiful picture, and I think it is so significant and so comforting. Also that’s something I say a lot, there’s a difference between proximity and presence.
My husband and I can be sitting on the couch together and be within proximity of each other, but if we’re both on our phones, or I’m reading, or I’m on my computer, and he’s doing his thing, we’re not in each other’s presence. So there’s a choice, an active choice that needs to be made, because God is always present, and He’s always choosing to be present with us.
Are we choosing to be present with Him? And what does that look like? So that’s awesome. So what did you see? What was the fruit of that and what was the transformation in the journey over that time? It’s funny because I think some people would say, “What do you mean you didn’t know each other’s husbands and kids’ names?
Isn’t that what spiritual communities are about?” You know, this is different. Like you guys have a spiritual community. This was more about learning the discipline of practicing His presence.
Check out the rest of this conversation: Intentionally Seeking God, & Corporate Intentionality
Check out the Dwell Meditations
