Sons of God's Generals: Unlocking the Power of Godly Inheritance (16 page)

But to my surprise, instead of me bending over the couch, my father bent over the couch and took the position for me to smack him. He said, “Okay Josh, hit me five times as hard as you can.”

I said, “Why?”

He responded, “Because I have evidently failed you as a father. I know of nothing else that will change you. So I need to be disciplined for my bad fathering skills. So I want you to hit me five times as hard as you can. Come on, Joshua, smack me now.”

I started crying and said, “No, Dad, I cannot punish you for what I did wrong. I am sorry, Daddy, I will stop misbehaving the first time the teachers ask me to stop.” Notice I promised my dad the first time I was asked to stop, I would. You see, I knew I am not a perfect kid. I needed to allow time for my behavior that had become a habit to begin a process of change in my life.

This revealed to me how much of a changed father I really had. Before his encounter with love I would have been the one getting the punishment. But after my father’s encounter with love it was this new father who stood in for me to receive punishment for my sins against his love and fathering me. It was my rebellion, my sin, yet he was willing to stand in and take punishment on my behalf. This is the true heart of love, that you would lay down your life for another.

This is the love that God showed the world by giving us His only Son to die for our sins. He took on our punishments so that we would not have to. This is the story of love that is revealed throughout the Bible. The story of a loving Father who loves His people with all of His heart, and a people who love their God back with all of their heart. This situation taught me the grace of God, but it wasn’t till years later that I would finally find God’s love for myself.

Growing up in this amazing Christian home, it was hard at times for me to personally feel God. I lived most of my life knowing I was a Christian but never experiencing His love for myself. I always lived my Christianity through my parents and it was never real for me. A hardship of growing up in a Christian environment all my life was losing the sense of the awe of God. This is something that you must discover for yourself. I had to go on this journey of seeking love that started for me a year before my birth. You see, I was a promise of God to my parents.

In 1985 my parents were the Salvation Army officers in Horry and Georgetown counties in South Carolina. Newly commissioned to this area, my mom, a very lively character, who was used to having a lot of friends around her for support, found herself in a life situation with so many dysfunctional people who seemed to want to suck the life right out of her. She was very used to hectic schedules, having received her own degree of 189 hours in two years with the Salvation Army Bible College. This, by the way, is almost equivalent to a master’s degree in two years, so you can image how busy my parents had been. Both graduating with honors while caring for my other two siblings left them with very little energy to love.

It did not take very long for my parents to begin to feel overwhelmed with their daily duties of running a two-county operation and trying to love their family. My mom finally had all she could handle and basically had a minor breakdown. My father had just recently met some spirit-filled Christian men who seemed really full of joy no matter how their lives were going. It was one of these men, Lynnwood Wilson, who was able to help my mom to overcome the seemingly overwhelming daily life chores so she could find joy again. On the day my mom had her breakdown, instead of taking her to the hospital my dad decided to find Lynnwood and have him pray for them. While driving down a two-lane highway from Conway, South Carolina to Georgetown, my parents had a very supernatural visitation from God.

My parents lived their lives in a constant state of overwhelming stress, to the point that my mom began to cry uncontrollably. All of a sudden my dad began to speak in a voice my mom had never heard. His eyes were closed, yet he was the driver of the vehicle. Not having experienced a heavenly encounter before, this scared my mom. The voice told her that she would next year at this time have a son, to name him Joshua Andrew Frost, and that his purpose in life was to be a warrior for souls in the Kingdom. A warring evangelist for the Kingdom of Heaven of some type. Being already on overload, my mom was dazed by all that had just happened, but like Mary it was so supernatural that her spirit was willing to accept this as from the Lord.

My parents had two older children at this point in their lives. My brother is eight years older than me and my sister is five years older, so my mom actually thought she was done with having any more children. She had had difficulty bearing children and depression afterward so this was not the best news my mom could have received, especially now. But a year later I was born because my parents accepted me as a supernatural gift to them from God.

Growing up I always knew what I was called to do. Mom and Dad constantly told me the story surrounding my birth. I was to be a warring evangelist for Jesus. But I never experienced Jesus for myself. I never had that encounter that I saw my father have. I too wanted an encounter with love but did not know how to get it. After pondering this most of my lifetime, I gave up and started pursuing the things my friends were into.

At the age of four is when my father first pushed me into my first wave surfing. Since that day I was hooked on surfing. Growing up as a surfer is a wonderful thing, but getting caught up in the culture cannot be good at times. Seeking an encounter with God and not finding it made me turn to this culture of surfing for value and purpose. The culture of surfing is made up of people who are trying to escape from the reality of finding and living their destinies. It is actually built on the stronghold of rebellion in the lives of many surfers. This culture has, for the most part, become so overwhelmed with trying to figure life out that they turn to drugs and partying as another means of escape from the realities of responsibility. Their mindset is “screw the world, let’s surf.”

Now not all surfers are like this but the ones I had gotten involved with were. Your desire, as a surfer in this culture, is to get high, hang out with friends, and surf the next good swell. By the time I reached the age of thirteen I started doing drugs. This is what my life was about for the next four years. I did not care who I hurt and who got in my way. I just wanted to have fun and fulfill my own desires in surfing. This behavior developed a habit of independence that later turned into rebellion. I wanted to do everything my way or it was not going to get done at all. During this time period, if you wanted to give me advice you could screw off and if you got in my way surfing I would yell at you and tell you to go home.

My life was all about me and my crew of friends I hung out with called the “Sweetflow Mafia.” Because I built this wall of independence in my life, I could not find God’s love. There were times throughout my youth that I tried to seek after God but could never find His love, that love that I so desired and knew was so real. The more I sought Him and could not find Him the more independent I became. After graduating high school I found a job in a local surf shop. While working at Island Inspired I learned how to shape surfboards. My goal in life at this point was to figure out a way to be a part of the surfing industry. Whether it was through surfing films or making surfboards, I did not care.

After working there for a couple months my father started to notice that I was going down a bad path. I was rebelling against my calling to be a warrior evangelist. Instead of becoming a warrior I was becoming a rebel. Living my life opposite and opposed to my destiny. I remember my parents would always try to talk to me about where my life was going. They would tell me that I was acting like a rebel but was called to be a warrior. I am a huge
Star Wars
fan, and every time my parents would tell me I was being a rebel, I would respond with, “The rebels in
Star Wars
were the good guys. Look at Yoda and Luke Skywalker.” Over and over they tried to remind me of my destiny and tried to help me see what I was called to do, but my heart was still too hard to find this love I so desired.

Ed Piorek has a saying that actually helped to reshape my life: “When you are strong you cannot find God’s love, but it is when you are weak God’s love finds you.” Because of my walls of independence I was too strong to find His love, but it took an encounter with God to finally soften my heart. My father told me about a school in Maui Hawaii called “Youth with a Mission.” He explained to me what the school was about and how they teach people what Christianity is all about. What sold me on this particular school was that my parents would pay for everything and I would be able to surf almost every day. Of course I jumped at the opportunity to be able to surf Hawaii for free.

Hawaii is known for its amazing surf. It had always been a dream of mine to surf the “Big Waves” around the world. My desire to go to the school was never to find God but only to find surf. But God tricked me without my realizing it. His plan for my life would unfold, and that desire to find only the next great wave would change.

A couple of weeks before leaving for Maui I was surfing in a local surf contest and fell off my board and got stabbed in the eye by my surfboard fin. What happened was I was hanging five and I went to hang ten and just nose-dived into the water. After falling, I looked up to see where my board was and the fin of my board hit me right in the eye. I instantly went into shock thinking my eye was hanging out of my head because I was bleeding everywhere. I could not see out of that eye which led me to believe something major was wrong. My friend paddled up to me in the water and asked what I was doing. I turned around and he yelled, “Oh my God!” Which did not help matters. He got me onto the beach and found someone to drive me to the ER. After a couple of eye tests, it was evident I did not have any major damage to the eyeball. I only had a cut on my face and a cut on the white part of my eye. Apparently the eye heals itself at a fast rate, because I was out surfing again four days later.

The next injury that I experienced happened a couple of weeks into my ministry school in Hawaii. I still was not too interested in pursuing God but was just there to fulfill my heart’s desire to surf. On one of my days off from school I was awakened by the sound of waves crashing. When you hear this sound in Hawaii you know the waves are big. So I jumped up, grabbed my surfboard, and hitched a ride to the nearest great surf spot. When I paddled out, the waves were around twelve feet high, measuring from the front of the wave.

Due to the fast pace of the building of the swells and the fact that Hawaii is an island in the middle of the ocean, the waves can double in height out of the blue. Which is just what happened this particular day. While waiting for a wave, a huge set came rolling in. A set is a group of waves that normally come in three to four waves per set. These sets tend to be shaped better and bigger than other waves. This set was around eighteen to twenty feet. I saw it coming, so I paddled further out to sea in hopes to paddle over the wave before it broke. I barely made it over the first wave, and then the second one came in. I paddled my heart out trying to get over it; the wave was so big, when I looked up at it I could no longer see the sky. Just a wall of water. I almost made it over, but the wave crashed and threw me back over the falls. I slammed into the reef. I tried to work my way up but could not tell which way was up.

Fighting for my life, trying to get a breath of air, I finally found the ground so I pushed off and shot up to the surface just at the right time to get the air I needed before passing out. Right when I got that breath of air, the third wave of the set came crashing down on my head. I instinctively swam down to the bottom and held on to the reef with all my might. The wave went past, and once again I jumped off the bottom of the ocean to get my breath of air I needed. While shooting to the surface, I could not make it any longer without the breath I needed. So I took a breath, but got nothing but water. I finally made it to the surface and spit up all the water that I just had swallowed. I made it up alive but weak, so I found my surfboard and paddled in. Still to this day I would say that that moment was the closest I have ever been to death.

My third injury occurred one week later. I was surfing on my friend’s short board. I caught a four-foot wave, but while riding down the wave I went to turn off the top of the wave. My board got caught at the top of the wave and I came falling down. The water where I was surfing was a very shallow spot, so I fell into about six inches of water. All my weight landed on my right toe, which led to me fracturing my foot in two spots. I found myself once again being rushed to the ER with an injury from surfing. God never causes injury or sickness, but He can use what the devil means for evil and turn it around for good. Which is exactly what happened in these cases. After getting treatment, I ended up with a walking boot. The doctor told me, “You cannot walk or surf for two months.” This was the worst news that I could have been told. Remember, I was a young man and the reason I even moved to Hawaii to attend a ministry school was to surf. Now the main thing in my life was gone.

The drive back from the ER was a silent one. I began to ponder all that was happening in my life. A pattern of injury was beginning to develop and I needed to know what the cause was. I was just talking with God in my head, telling Him,
I guess I should try out this God thing
. After all, this was what everyone was into here at this school. But I told God, “If I pursue You again, I do not want what I experienced last time. I want a love encounter like You gave my father many years ago. I want my life to be transformed the way his was.” I saw the transformation in his life and wanted that for my own. So for the next three days, I would lie in my bed reading books of the Bible and just crying out for this love encounter of a Father who happens to be God.

Finally, my heart was at a place where it could receive this love. I was no longer too strong to find God’s love, but that night in my weakness God’s love found me. He found me in crisis of weakness. The only way I can explain it is that it felt like I was sitting in my Father’s lap and He had both arms wrapped around me, pouring His love into me. “Liquid Love.” From that moment, I have not looked back in my journey of love. Never before did I know what the
warring
part of my “warring evangelist” calling meant. But I do know now that the warring part was to be a warrior in love for the souls of the earth. My journey of love led me to the discovery of what Christianity is all about—experiencing the goodness of God’s love and making it known to the next person I meet.