Pastoral Care Ministries

But the person who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.
1 Cor. 6:17 Amplified Bible
I in them, and Thou in Me, that they might find perfection in oneness.
John 17:23, Heinz W. Cassirer, God’s New Covenant

NEWSFLASH

It is with great joy and thanksgiving that I announce an upcoming Pastoral Care School, to be held July 25-30, 2010, at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. It is a school I had hoped to see come about at least a year or so ago, but due to the need to semi-retire, it was imperative that the responsibility be shifted to younger, stronger shoulders! This has now been done, exactly as we had so earnestly hoped and prayed it would be.

The work will be carried on through a new ministry led by Mark Pertuit, a precious servant of the Lord who needs no introduction to most of you. Its name and address is:

Mark Pertuit, President
Ministries of Pastoral Care, Inc.
P. O. Box 5085
Morton, IL 61550
Email: pastoralcare@mtco.com
Website: http://www.ministriesofpastoralcare.com/

The name of the individual conferences will be Pastoral Care Schools. We are deeply grateful that your many precious letters crying out for healing and training can now be answered by saying, “Come!” The subject matter, team members, and healing prayer services will continue much the same as they were in PCM conferences, only with great new masculine sinew, strength, and vision! The Lord willing, I hope to be there part of the time serving with Mark, and look forward to greeting you all and once again crying out, “Come, Holy Spirit, come!”

In the holy name of Jesus,

Leanne Payne

P.S. The work of Pastoral Care Ministry (Leanne Payne) will continue as the Lord and my convalescence allows, primarily through newsletters, writing, and the website.

For the long and steep ascent of life, our Father has given us a companion...even Jesus our
Lord.... He has passed along our pathway, and climbed our steep ascents....

Dear ones, scattered all over the globe,
Thanks for all your letters and prayers, those written and prayed over the past many months in response to my need to semi-retire (i.e., no more full PCMs with me at the helm). The necessity of resting when the inspiration and desire is to be up and going can be more than a little discouraging! Thanks also for your truly wonderful and varied responses to Heaven’s Calling: A Memoir of One Soul’s Steep Ascent. I’ve been mightily gratified and blessed by them. One of the surprises has been the reaction of men to it, one that evokes long, deeply thoughtful letters indicating a personal identification with my “steep ascent”and therefore an increased understanding of their own. That happens together with an increased “intuition of the real,” such as the work of the Holy Spirit and what is taught in my other books through reading this one.

My encouragement knows no end as I continue to learn from you not only about the healings you have received in our Pastoral Care Schools through the years, but of the ways you are so effectively ministering God’s healing love to others! The following is a precious example:

Dear Leanne,
   This is written to you after many years of attending your conferences and gleaning the deep truths intricately shared in the books you have authored. I read The Broken Image immediately after its release in the early 1980s. It was like a spring of living water to my parched and wounded soul. I was 29 years old and had been caught in the homosexual lifestyle since age 15. This book alone brought me the hope that there was true healing from the Lord Jesus Christ. It took many years, but now I am living out the truths you taught in The Broken Image, The Healing Presence, Restoring the Christian Soul, and Listening Prayer. Other books that I have taken to heart include Valerie McIntyre’s Sheep in Wolves’ Clothingand Mario Bergner’s Setting Love in Order. These are all very powerful and anointed books.
   In 2002 I graduated with my Master in Marriage and Family Counseling. This past year the Holy Spirit led me to start a 501c(3) organization focused on those who have been touched by trauma and abuse. Unto Others, Inc., is currently offering individual and group counseling. The fundamentals you teach in your conferences and books are what God is using in my counseling and group sessions to set wounded ones free and heal them in their innermost being. Where humanistic psychology has failed, the Cross succeeds completely. The healing that God has done in my own life through the Cross, listening prayer, and His loving Presence is cemented into my spirit. He now uses what I have learned on my healing journey to bring others into the in-depth healing that only His precious Presence brings to such wounded souls.
   Leanne, no words are available for the awesome thankfulness I feel towards my God, my Savior, and you. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our Father’s heart for the broken and wounded--which at one time described me. I was at the top of this list without hope for the future. You dedicated The Broken Imageas follows: "To all who have endured or now suffer homosexual identity crisis, especially those who have feared there was no help to be found." Thank you for leading me to the help that has set me free and healed me of my lesbian identity crisis, my lack of sense of well-being and sense of being, and my self-hatred. I am 57 years old now. On June 6, 1998, during the Wheaton PCM conference you stated, "Overcoming takes patience, perseverance, and obedience." No truer statement has ever been spoken, as this is what it has taken for me to be free from all my diseased thinking and destructive behaviors. God has mercifully healed my pain and my life...
   I close this by quoting one of my favorite Scriptures and one that you have spoken of often: “He sent His Word to heal them and bring them alive out of the pit of death” (Psalm 107:20 neb).

On the other hand and in great contrast, it has been painful to receive letters written by folk who were panicking, having planned for several years to come to a PCM and deal with their critical spiritual and emotional needs, only to find the schools canceled. For them, as for those unable to travel, I’ve learned to recommend that they order a full school’s tapes (such as those from the 2007 PCM) and regularly find a place of quiet solitude in which they can listen without interruption. They can then enter into the prayers on the tapes and receive the healing and further understanding they need. The reports from folk who do this very intentionally, having read the books as well, are a great blessing indeed.

One such person was a young man in his thirties who had struggled with homosexual thoughts since age 14. Though he never acted out his same-sex attraction, he became addicted to pornography. A demonic invasion of his mind followed that was horrifying and irrational. He “began to be tormented by things too awful to mention thoughts of incest, bestiality, violent thoughts, occasionally blasphemy...” The mental struggle led to a physical breakdown, leaving him an invalid. Devastated, he finally told his family what he was suffering and also ordered The Healing Presence and The Broken Image. In reading them he recognized the “cannibal compulsion” in his life as well as other disorders stemming from lack of a secure masculine identity. Here is an excerpt from a long letter indicating keen understanding of what he had read:

I recognize now that, having father issues and body issues (I felt emotionally rejected by my father around age eight and became very overweight), I’ve been trying to assume the masculinity or the perfect bodies of the men in pornography. Also, what you wrote about the disease of introspection.... Also, what you’ve written about people failing to receive an adequate sense of being, or well-being...

Know that there is the spiritual and emotional help that you seek. You must, however, make a radical decision to obey the Lord your God. As you know from Heaven’s Calling, that was the turning point in my life and it is the chief turning point for the good and the eternal in every life. I recommend that you read Restoring the Christian Soul next, followed by Listening Prayer and the starting of a listening prayer journal. One of the things that the Lord will be doing is to bring you up out of the terrible ennui of mental, spiritual and emotional sloth. You have a good mind, and you must put it now to good use, and your body will follow course. Together with the reading of Restoring the Christian Soul, I recommend that you get the full set of CDs of the 2007 Pastoral Care Ministries School, which includes the healing sessions... I believe you will be amazed at the healing you receive as you prayerfully go through the CDs. It is important that you have privacy and that you prepare yourself to fully receive from the Lord...

Do not neglect to get the necessary medical and psychiatric evaluations and care that you need as you grow in the Lord. May the Lord bless you as you seek Him with all your heart and get on with your “becoming” in Him! From your letter, I believe that the Lord is urging you toward becoming that man He created you to be.

Sometime later he sent an update, and I was delighted to hear of his progress. He wrote:

Dear Leanne Payne,
   I have to write and thank you so much for the advice you gave the last time I wrote you... I ordered the books [you recommended] from Amazon and read them (I had already read three others you wrote, including The Healing Presence). They were incredible! Restoring the Christian Soul is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and very helpful to me. Then I ordered the PCM CDs....You said it was best to listen to them when I had time to myself to receive from the Lord, so I started listening the first of January. I went through all of them, even the ones that I didn’t think applied (that was a very short list). They were fantastic! I just finished them last week. I truly believed I needed the sense of being and sense of well-being prayers, along with the others. The CDs on “Healing of Homosexuality” were excellent, very helpful. I love how open, insightful, and truly spiritual your team is. And also how low-key and normal they seem....
   I’ve listened to all the CDs at least once, but I know I’ll go back and repeat many of them in time. I still regularly pray some of the prayers when I feel in need of them. Once again, I really want to thank you. I’ve been devouring books on inner healing for years, but your books and that conference are truly amazing, a marvelous work of the Lord. God bless you for everything you do, and I pray for you and your ministry. Any further prayers for me would be greatly appreciated, as I’m still being healed and coming to a place of victory in Jesus.
   Sincerely,

“Let us hold fast the profession of our Faith without wavering: for He is faithful that promised.” (Heb. 10:23)

Faith is an attribute of the heart, rather than of the head. It is largely intuitive in its first promptings. It is impossible to argue men into faith. Do not think, discuss, or reason too much about Faith, or you will miss it. It is like Love in this, that when you turn the dissecting knife on it for the purpose of analysis, its spirit and life vanish, leaving only the faded relics of what was once a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. If, however, turning from Faith to any object which is worthy of it, you concentrate heart and mind there, almost unconsciously Faith will have arisen and thriven to maturity.¹

“...so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.” (Heb. 6:12 esv)

Master: Very few of my followers realize how deadly is sloth. It is the sleeping sickness of the soul; it is stupidity of heart; it is sluggishness of mind; it is lethargy of will; it is atrophy of desire; it is insensitiveness of body; it is stagnation of estate--all due to a selfish refusal to recognize the claims of God and men. Sloth betokens a sullen cruelty of subconscious indifference to the needs of others, a malicious rejection of the duty of devoting all the heart, all the soul, all the mind, and all the strength in the lifelong service of goodwill to all the world.
Sloth, inertia, deadness, stupidity, dullness, inefficiency, insensitiveness, ignorance--all these may be regarded as “passive malice,” all deadly sins, all representing opposition to My Kingdom!²

We moderns are often simultaneously trapped in a restless activism and a technology-induced passivity, the noise-feed constantly at the ear, the addiction to watching and listening rather than the deliberate choice of being and doing. Therefore, we end up depressed, mired in introspection, and suffering with doubts. Iâ€™m seeing a great upswing in these conditions in Christians in this our day, and therefore insert these quotes, one a virtue and one a vice.

My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away,
for behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree ripens its figs, and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away.”

At 3:00 a.m., having just received this beautiful summons by her Lord, Lucy died. The nurses were in awe of the way she so quietly and wonderfully entered eternal life. A relative arrived on the scene very speedily and in amazement reported that Lucy’s bedroom was filled with angels!

Since a year or so before PCM was incorporated, Lucy has been a prayer partner of mine, one far beyond the ordinary in terms of prevailing, faith-filled prayer. She had powerfully interceded for me and every PCM since its incorporation. One does not lose such a fellow pilgrim on the road of life (our “steep ascent”) without sustaining a grave sense of loss.

I was away from home when the news came, in Florida receiving the help that through the years has helped me deal with severe chronic fatigue difficulties. Now, in the midst of grief and far from prayer partners (or even other Christians), our loving Creator God ministered to me through a part of His creation I could never have imagined existed.

There had been a storm farther out at sea, and as I walked on the beach, one of its large waves had carefully deposited a most beautiful, and very fragile shell—right in my path. Amazingly, it was unbroken. This gift from the sea was unlike any shell I’d ever seen before, and even rarer in my sight was its living creature, yet within it! It looked like a baby octopus, for I could see its “suction cupped” tentacles tucked inside. It had only one eye, and that eye was looking straight into mine. It seemed keen, even thoughtful! Who would expect to intuit intelligence in a shell creature! I later found that my intuition was right on.

When I picked up the shell, the little creature instantly sent out its tentacles and circled my hand. In a purely reflex action I upended the shell, and to my utter dismay the creature fell out. I learned later that had I managed to get it back into the water, it still would not have lived. Shell in hand, I went back to find Floridians who had long lived by the sea, but one after another was as amazed as I was and had never seen a shell anything like this one. Finally, someone identified it, having seen only one such shell, and that 20 years ago! He said it was a Nautilus, very rare, and that Anne Morrow Lindberg in her book Gift from the Sea had a full chapter on it.³ It turned out to be the Paper Shell Nautilus, or Argonauta, a Cephalopod.⁴

Space doesn’t allow me to recount all I learned about it, but the exquisiteness of the shell and the extraordinary story of the life and intelligence of the female Cephalopod (only the female “spins” or forms the shell and that only when carrying her eggs; afterward she leaves it) left me not only in awe and glorifying God but with a greater experience of the way His creation shines with transcendence! In the midst of my sorrow, truth and beauty flooded into my soul and comforted me.

As soon as I learned that the shell was a Nautilus, a vague memory of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Chambered Nautilus” (another Cephalopod) came to mind. Surely too he knew awe over a shell. Here are the last two stanzas:

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

The preciousness that was Lucy and the efficacy of her love and prayer life lives on. Lucy is, in so many vital ways, still with us; she has only left her outgrown shell.

We are delighted that so many more of the books are being translated into other languages. Since our last newsletter, new translations of our books have come out in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, German, Korean, and Spanish. I pray daily for those who are reading these books, and some of you have written that you seem to sense that!

I Once Was a Buddhist Nun

Esther Baker
Inter-Varsity Press, 2009
Paperback: 192 pages
ISBN: 978-1844743841 ISBN-10: 1844743845

Esther’s story is a beautiful one, an accounting of Christ’s shepherding hand, as she is led out from under a deeply blinding idolatry and into His eternal life-giving light and tender love. She is now faithfully (on some of the most difficult of mission fields) passing this miracle on to the neediest of others. In doing so, she treads in the long train of all those who “hold to the testimony of Jesus” and worship Him (Rev. 19:10). It is available from Amazon.com.

For those asking questions about The Shack, here are some excellent commentaries by Drs. Michael Youssef and Albert Mohler:

Just as I was finishing this newsletter, I received word of the release of the Manhattan Declaration. On November 20, 2009, at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., a seminal statement signed by over 145 Evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic leaders was announced. This document addresses the need to defend and advance the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty. For years we here have been most earnestly praying weekly for God to raise up Christian leaders able to speak truth in such way that it can be heard both nationally and internationally.Â We have asked God for those who will take a public stand against the government attacks on our freedom to live out our faith in this society. We are greatly encouraged at this declaration—one of God’s answers to our prayers. If you wish to read the declaration and sign it yourself, you will find it here.

Though it is only November now, I fear that this newsletter will not reach you until after Christmas. Even so, dear ones, I hope for you a most blessed Advent, Christmas, and New Year.

¹F. B. Meyer, Our Daily Walk (Scotland, Great Britain: Christian Focus, 1993), November 12.
²John Gayner Banks, The Master and the Disciple (St. Paul, MN: Macalester Park, 1954), November 14.
³Ch 6: “Argonauta (the Paper Shell Nautilus)”
⁴See this creature courtesy of Paul Mikkelsen, Seabean in color at http://www.seabean.com/ThingsThatFloat/PaperNautilus/Index.htm