Devotion Pyes in Longing

In September 2002, I was told by the Lord that He was going to give me 5 dreams in 5 nights and they would be the blueprints of the house of prayer.  At this time, there was no PIHOP – just the vision of a city wide house of prayer.  So that night I went to sleep, and as promised God gave me a dream…

In the dream, Mike Bickle – the founder and leader of IHOP-KC – was privately teaching me the Song of Songs. He was carefully watching to see that I wrote down every word he said.  At one point, I didn’t write down a phrase he said, so he asked me, “Why didn’t you write that down?”

I replied, “I’m not going to write down, ‘Devotion dies in longing’.”

He said, “I didn’t say ‘dies’, I said, ‘pyes.’  Devotion pyes in longing.”

So I wrote it down, and I wrote it p-y-e-s.  I had never seen that word before, but in the dream I wrote it down like I knew it.

When I awakened from the dream, the word “pyes” was fresh in my mind, so I got my dictionary out from under my bed and looked it up immediately.  My dictionary defined it as ” a set of rules used in the pre-Reformation church to determine the correct order of worship.”

I was blown away… pye was not only a word but a word used in a church setting.  God had my attention.  I believe He was saying that the foundation of the house of prayer is intimacy – represented by the Song of Songs.  We were to go deep in intimacy and this would set everything else in order.

Now at the time I had this dream, PIHOP did not exist.  It wasn’t til a year later, when a group of us were filling out paperwork that it was suggested that instead of being called IHOP Pasadena (which is what I wanted us to be called) that we should put Pasadena in the front and become Pasadena International House of Prayer – this would be more original.  No one was thinking of the acronym.  So I gave in and went with the majority and Pasadena International House of Prayer became our official name.

Well, I was excited that we had become official, so I went and told a group of my friends about the Pasadena International House of Prayer.  Their first response was, “Oh that’s PI-HOP!”  And then the dream came back to me about “Devotion Pyes in Longing” and that it would be part of the blueprints of the house of prayer. I was blown away about how specific and clever God is.  He’s so intricate and sovereign in weaving our lives together.