Ripple Stories

The Sound of Souls in the Netherlands

A few years ago, I (Lynn) stood in a 12th-century cathedral in Delft, teaching a congregation about what it means to walk with God. The air was still, as it often is in those ancient stone spaces, but in the middle of a sentence, the silence was shattered—not by a sound in the room, but by a sound in the spirit.

I began to hear weeping. It was the desperate wailing of souls screaming for mercy. The Lord opened my ears to the inner cry of the people sitting right in front of me, and I knew with certainty that seven people were teetering on the edge of salvation.

I stopped mid-sentence. The room fell quiet, but the spiritual crying continued. "If you are here and you want to give your life to Jesus Christ," I said, "stand up right now." I waited only a moment before repeating the call: "You are crying out for His mercy. Stand up."

Slowly, a 78-year-old man—the patriarch of that community—began to rise. As he stood, the heavy silence broke into a roar of joy. The congregation went wild; they had been interceding for this man for twelve years. Once the praise subsided, I felt the prompt again. "There are more of you," I called out. Six others stood, answering the cry I had heard moments before.

The Ghost of the Queen

When Linda and I (Lynn) first stepped aboard the Queen Mary, the experience rivaled our first glimpse of Neuschwanstein Castle—a parade of architectural marvels that demanded a constant "Wow!" We knew her legend: a titan of the seas powered by twenty-seven boilers and 160,000 horsepower, a ship so swift she could outrun any U-boat. With 1,001 successful Atlantic crossings to her name, she felt like the safest place on earth.

But history felt distant the day we arrived. Since 1967, the Queen has been entombed in a rock jetty in Long Beach, California. Her engines are cold, her voyages are over, and her original purpose has been traded for the quiet life of a four-star hotel and museum.

The ship isn't useless, but she is misplaced. She was never meant to be a stationary relic. In the same way, the "Master Carpenter" declared He would build a Church that the gates of hell could not withstand. Today, He is restoring that original blueprint. He is moving the Church out of the "dry dock" of tradition and back into the home—the place where ordinary people perform extraordinary ministry through their spiritual gifts.