Six hours a day, six days a week for nine months: one evangelist's account of pressing into God's presence until it became a lifestyle, not an event.
Six hours a day, six days a week, no food, no water, no conversation. For nine months. That was the commitment Evangelist Joshua Humphrey made when he decided he was no longer content with a "touch" of God's presence and wanted to live inside it continuously. The books that pushed him there were The Practice of the Presence of God — the Brother Lawrence and Frank Laubach edition — and Benny Hinn's Good Morning, Holy Spirit. Reading about monks who walked in constant awareness of God, he landed on a simple conclusion: if God would do that for a couple of monks in the mountains, he'd do it for anyone desperate enough to pursue it.
"I am going to get desperate for God and so hungry."
Desperation, in this telling, is a methodology. Joshua describes setting up six-hour morning blocks and entering them without agenda — sometimes praying, sometimes worshipping, sometimes just sitting in silence. Occasionally the Lord would give him an address. No GPS, just a location, and he'd drive there and sit in his car until the presence of God showed up. A month passed, then two, then four. He admits to falling asleep a few times. "Lord, I thought you'd come talk to me today, but look, if you're bored with me, I'm going to sleep." The honesty is part of the point: the process wasn't cinematic. It was cumulative.
By month nine, he describes something shifting — not a dramatic event but a slow immersion, like the river in Ezekiel that rises from ankles to knees to waist until you're swimming. When he looked back at where he'd started, his assessment of his earlier ministry was brutal: "That was pathetic. How in the world was I actually even in ministry?"
The danger he identifies for ministers specifically is treating an initial encounter with God as a finished transaction. Get the touch once, carry it forever. Both Joshua and his wife Kristen push back on that framing hard. Kristen's language is precise: "It's one baptism, but many infillings. Be being filled." The Greek continuous tense she's pointing toward means the filling is never past tense.
The anointing is in you, on you, and made to go through you — a conduit, not a container.
For Joshua, the practical implication is that sometimes you have to throw yourself back into God's presence the way you'd throw yourself into water — not gently, not gradually, but all at once, because you've drifted far enough into the "muck of life" that only immersion will clean it off. He describes going into services in Tampa with one determination: he was not leaving until he was "drunk in the presence of God." The comparison he draws is deliberate. When people used to go to bars, they made a concrete decision about the outcome before they walked in. He thinks Christians need that same specificity of intention with worship.
The gym story lands as the clearest illustration of what this kind of lifestyle actually produces in the world outside church walls.
Joshua and his wife had one night off between ministry engagements in Southern California. They went to dinner, spotted an LA Fitness across the street, and walked in to ask about a membership. The manager brought in the general manager. The two of them ran what Joshua calls a "car salesman pitch." When negotiations stalled and the general manager asked what Joshua did for a living, Joshua recognized the question as an open door.
There's a flame for every name.
He told them plainly: he and his wife travel and tell people about Jesus. That answer turned the conversation inside out. Joshua shared his testimony, and as he described it, "the preach came on me like I'm in a revival meeting" — in a gym, with people signing up for memberships at eight nearby tables and others on treadmills looking down. The manager on the left side of the room started shaking under what Joshua identified as the power of God. Tears. Joshua stood up, pointed at him, and named what was happening. The entire gym stopped.
The word of knowledge that followed was specific: the manager had grown up in the church, come from a family of preachers, walked away because of religion and tradition, not because of God. Everything confirmed accurate. They all grabbed hands. Both men prayed a prayer of salvation.
The general manager's closing line is what Joshua keeps returning to. Driving to work that morning, passing a joint back and forth, the man had said out loud: "There's got to be more to life than this." By that afternoon, God had answered him in an LA Fitness in Southern California.
Kristen's story runs on a different track but lands in the same place. She felt God's presence briefly as a child after her father got saved, then lost contact with it when he moved to Alaska and she was left in an unchurched home. College meant parties. She kept her promise to visit her dad the summer after her sophomore year, showed up resistant, sat through church services she hadn't planned for, and found herself in a McDonald's drive-thru somewhere in Alaska saying to God: "Okay. If you're real, I want all of you. But if you're not, I've lost nothing."
Six weeks later she was saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, and being taken into a men's maximum security prison for a ministry meeting. She was twenty, from Montana, had never been near a prison, walked through a block of men whistling at her, heard the door slam behind her, and got filled with the Holy Ghost in a meeting where murderers were laughing and crying under the power of God. She also got healed of a tailbone injury from rollerblading.
"I just knew God had invaded my life. And I'm like, you're real, God. And I want everything that you have."
Within six weeks she had left her scholarship at a private liberal arts college, enrolled in a non-accredited Bible school in Oklahoma she'd moved to before the acceptance letter arrived, and told her family she was pursuing ministry. They told her she'd been brainwashed and was joining a cult. She went anyway.
What she kept: the international business instinct. What changed: the destination. "Now I just do God's international business."
The thread connecting every story in this conversation is the refusal to settle for nominal Christianity — what Kristen calls "religious crap" and what Joshua frames as the gap between what believers think is available to them and what actually is. Most people, he says, assume they're supposed to get on the struggle bus, go to work, come home, and endure. They love God. They just don't realize that the power of God is not primarily for church services. It's for service — in the community, in the marketplace, on airplanes, in gyms, at 30,000 feet over Saudi Arabia during Ramadan.
Joshua tells the airplane story almost as a companion piece to the gym story. Waking up from an eight-hour sleep next to a stranger, jet-lagged, dragon breath, the last thing he wanted was a conversation. The man said his sleep looked like peace. Joshua recognized it as an open door, shared his testimony, prayed for the man's drug-addicted son, and led him to Christ. The man's wife had been praying for him for twenty-five years. His first words after the prayer: "She is never going to believe that I found God 30,000 feet over Saudi Arabia."
"When you serve God full out, there is no such thing as a boring day."
The book Joshua credits with shaping this expectation is John G. Lake's Adventures in God. The book the hosts cite is Lester Summerall's Run with the Vision. In both cases the appeal is the same: a life led by the Spirit is, by definition, a life full of things you didn't plan and couldn't have arranged.
Both Joshua and Kristen make a distinction worth holding onto: the anointing doesn't originate in you, but it does have to move through you. That requires staying yielded, which requires staying hungry, which requires treating presence-seeking the way Joshua treated those nine months in his living room — not as a seasonal practice but as a continuous one, interrupted sometimes by the muck of life and requiring a violent return.
Reinhard Bonnke's phrase gets the last word here: there is a flame for every name. Not a warm feeling, but fire. The expectation is that every believer carries an assignment for every day, and that assignment shows up in gyms, on airplanes, in prisons in Alaska, in McDonald's drive-thrus. The condition for receiving it is simple and demanding in equal measure: get hungry, press in, and refuse to leave until you have what you came for.
