To the church in Kremmling -

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

My name is Rebekah Jordan. If you don’t know me, I’m the redhead you may have seen floating around with a camera. You all are the dearest people to my heart on this planet. Many of you I’ve not had the pleasure of knowing closely yet, but I look forward to doing so. Each one of you is so beautiful and set apart, and together, you display the splendor of the Lord in a breathtaking way. What God has planted here in Kremmling is spreading across the region and even throughout this nation. 

I am from Dallas, Texas. The Lord (or as I call him, Papa) brought me to Kremmling in January 2021. Up until that point, my life had been an exhausting series of attempts to please God through striving. These attempts led me to experience severe panic attacks and depression, hear demons, fall into abusive relationships, and want to end my life by the age of 23. I never felt good enough for God, but I was giving him everything I knew how to, starving for relationship. 

I did not know how to receive love from people. I wanted to break this cycle, so I enrolled in a Bible school gap year program in Fraser, CO. I believed that if I forced myself into community, far away from my past in Texas, I could fix the broken thing inside of me that couldn’t receive love. Instead, as the first semester of Bible school was ending, I was still stuck in patterns of codependency and self-protection. I couldn’t let anyone in.

Which brings us to early December, 2020, the last week before Christmas break. I had all but resolved not to return for the second semester. I had given up on this idea of real “community” that I’d heard about all my life in church. Either it didn’t exist, or I was the problem. Either way, I had resigned to a life of accepting leftover love from people and not asking for more.

We drove west in a 15-passenger van. I shivered in a thick jacket and a beanie. It was Friday, our weekly outreach day. Today we were going to Kremmling Community Church.

We filed in past the stained glass windows, ready to clean the church’s bathrooms or do some other act of service. Instead, the pastor had us sit in a circle. To my surprise, he had shoulder-length blond hair and tattoos, which didn’t quite match the stained glass windows in my mind.

And he wasn’t interested in having us clean bathrooms. He and another woman from the church, also with shoulder-length blond hair, smiled with their eyes as a little girl danced in the middle of the circle. The pastor, Robbie, invited us to lie down wherever we liked, while he played some worship music on the speakers. “Let’s let Holy Spirit talk to us,” he said.

I lay down and let the music wash over me, and something broke. I was flooded with an unshakable feeling that I was home.

I returned to Colorado after Christmas break - but not to the Bible school. Instead, I moved into the blue house on Battle Creek Ranch. I slept in the back room, came to church on Sundays, and quickly found that this “church” spilled over into every day of the week, into every place, even into that back room as children ran down the ranch road to come see me. It was the community I’d been looking for. It was family. You guys did life together. 

Your love was different. It felt different. I experienced it before I could explain it. There was no striving in it, no expectation, no fear. Certainly no codependency or self-protection. It was open-handed, and yet so deep, so powerful, so healing. I grasped the language for this love one Sunday evening as Robbie read from John 15:

Abide in my love.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

I had always heard these words, but I had never seen anyone live them. Here I was in a community full of people who were doing that. It was the same thing we’d done that very first Friday when we lay on the chairs. You guys were able to love so effortlessly because you were simply overflowing with the love of your Maker towards yourself.

All this time, I’d thought my problem was receiving love from others. It had never occurred to me that I could just sit and receive love from God. 

I lived in Kremmling for four months, watching you guys give and receive love and not keep score; it wasn’t transactional. I observed that your favorite thing to do was interact directly with “Papa” and receive his love. Before long, I wasn’t an observer. I got caught up in the river, and Papa healed me of years of pain and began revealing who he really was - and who I was in him.

To be love

Is to be loved by you.

Those four months changed my life. I mark the chapters of my story as before Kremmling and after Kremmling. I see God differently. I see love differently. I see everyone and everything differently. And I know I’m not the only one.

Papa has chosen to reveal himself this way to all who say yes - and you have said yes. You have locked arms with him and with one another, determined to grasp the fullness of oneness. And in these last days, the witness of our oneness will be a supernatural beacon of hope to a world that desperately needs it. It will provoke dying spirits to hunger for something that they didn’t know was possible - hunger for a God who is better, sweeter, more satisfying than they ever dreamed.

I want to thank you for your commitment to intimacy. Papa used your “yes” to change my life. I feel like part of the family now, and I hold that with deep gratitude and humility. And now, I want to share a “yes” that I recently gave to Papa myself.

In September 2022, Papa invited me into a creative adventure with him, centered around how he has revealed himself in Kremmling. His heart was so pleased with your “yes,” and with the way he has been able to dwell here. He invited me to translate that story into three creative expressions: A feature-length film, a series of filmed memoirs, and a series of writings.

The filming was what made me the most nervous. I personally don’t like to be filmed. It makes me feel exposed and self-conscious. In my work as a filmmaker, I often joke that I stay behind the camera on purpose. When I’m in front of it, I feel as though the eyes of the world are on me. 

So I asked Papa what he thought about the camera. Surely I wasn’t the only one who felt this way - and I didn’t want to force that feeling upon the people I love most. Yet I knew he had asked me to make this film. It utterly confused me - why would he have me carry something that signifies production and performance into a place of intimacy and authenticity? 

Papa, I said, you have to show me. How can I preserve intimacy with the presence of a camera? 

And I heard him say, let me do it.

I paused. I paused for months. I didn’t move until I heard him say something else.

Then he told me, I am the director. You’re just my cinematographer. 

The pressure’s off, baby. I will tell you when and what to film. You just have to trust me and leave behind all your understanding.

I felt my film training, my strategies, my anxieties float away. I realized that if I could just do what I see the Father doing, like Jesus did, then I could certainly film what I see him filming. It’s simple. He’s a good enough shepherd for that.

The camera is not the eyes of the world, he said. Not in your hands. In your hands, that camera becomes the eyes of heaven.

Ephesians 3:9-10 says that the mystery of our oneness is actually a witness to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, a witness of the manifold wisdom of God. His wisdom is so much higher than mine, and he is filming things I may not have chosen to film, and he is asking me not to film things that I would normally choose to. His purpose is eternal. Those who behold him through this film, both in heaven and on earth, both during the filming process and after it is finished, will be ushered into deeper intimacy as they feel the fiery eyes of Jesus upon them.

I have heard the Lord say that when my camera is pointed toward you, his eyes of honor are upon you. 

So I invite you to talk deeply with him about this story. He has told me very little about the finished product, but he knows what it is, and he is revealing it to all of us, not just to me. Robbie and Kelsey have been shepherding me from the very beginning of this journey. Please spend time with Papa, and spend time on this website, exploring the things he’s shown us so far. And I encourage you to talk with me, too, if he leads you. I welcome any questions, hesitations, or words he gives you. It’s my greatest desire to love Him and love you well in honor.

“...So that the multifaceted wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him. Therefore I ask you not to become discouraged about my tribulations on your behalf, since they are your glory.

“For this reason I bend my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner self, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to all the fullness of God.

“Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.” Ephesians 3:10-21