What is your wrestle?

8-13-2020

I am going to take a minute to just be real, but also maybe share encouragement for others having "one of those days" as well.

I woke around 2 in the morning with intense back pain that would keep me awake for an hour or two. I manage to go back to sleep to wake with a horrific migraine that I fought all day to control and baby along. I would then be presented with one thing after another that would only turn out to be a disappointment. The intense anxiety I dealt with would dare to have a contest staring me in the face. My rights as an individual would be challenged and still are.

How many times do we seem to get a breakthrough on something for satan to come beating on the back door to see if we will open the door for him? He will peer around and stare you down at any open window to see if he can get your attention. The sheer moments feeling the heaviness of the air of disappointment and challenges that can just take your breath away if you let it.

I would simply find myself being reminded to rest in the presence of the father who says he has all things in control. Even our challenges, disappointments, and frustrations. Even those things that may have to cause life-altering decisions in the near future. I would be reminded of some verses he kept bringing me back to read.

Ephesians 6:12 says For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.

Who is it and what is it I am fighting? Not my circumstances, but the principalities and forces that would try to distract and cause me to crumble. Hence the next passage I have been standing on all day in I Peter 5:8-11 that says Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. 9 Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith. Remember that your family of believers[a] all over the world is going through the same kind of suffering you are.

10 In his kindness, God called you to share in his eternal glory by means of Christ Jesus. So after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation. 11 All power to him forever! Amen.

Stay Alert! Stand Strong and Firm in your faith. He will RESTORE and Strengthen you! He will place you on a firm foundation.

As I would find myself caught in the moments of heaviness and disappointment, I would just continue to make a choice to continue to keep the praise and worship music going and at times specifically choose songs that would allow me to soak and just get caught up in praising God for who he is in my life. It would be these moments that would provide a sense of grounding and a breath of fresh breathable air. I can't change what goes on in the world and most of what seems to go on in my life, but I can change what I choose to do to respond to those things. Will I stay stuck and weighed in the mud or will I rest in the mud and let myself be purified in the process of learning to rest in my father's presence while in the mud.

One thing the other night opened my eyes to is how many ways Satan will try to distract and divert our attention from the work and relationship God wants for our lives. Who or what am I wrestling or am I learning to rest and trust the process?

Take courage and stand strong my friends.

Tearing Down Walls

 

8-12-2020

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a special event through Ignite the Fire.  It took everything in me just to go.  I had been walking through a very difficult season spiritually and only recently began to find glimpses of just seeking and seeing God in the mud of life.  I had reached a point where I was deeply questioning and wrestling with my faith wondering how any of it was even connected and where I was going.  What was the end times going to look at and would I be guaranteed to make it.  I had reached a fork in the road.  I was left with a hard choice of holding on and seeking what I needed or taking another path that would have ultimately left in a position much worse than I had been in before.  

I had started remembering, seeing glimpses, and feeling snippets of encounters I experienced with God from before.  How could I forget and deny all that in such a difficult and dark season?  It was a wake-up call. One that I could not deny.  One that had through one encounter with Satan himself left me paralyzed with fear.  So paralyzed I knew how very real the forces of good and evil were.  One that left me paralyzed to consider traveling the other road that would initially seem easy to travel.  The road I knew I had to travel had a gap like that of a deep trench, valley, or gorge.  If I was to take such a road, how was I supposed to cross the gap?  I was burned out, exhausted, and absolutely done in every sense of the word.  I found myself just in this brutal face to face real encounters with God.  I was angry.  I was scared.  I was confused.  I was many things all mixed up in one bag of a mess that I could no longer carry, nor had tools and energy to find a way to bridge the gap.  Doors were closing with different things and I found myself even more isolated and confused.  Yet somehow, I knew it only seemed to be a transitional door.  Soon God led conversations and courage on my part to allow myself to be vulnerable to a few people.  He had already designed who would be needed to be intercessors through prayer.  They would be the boards or the planks that would build the bridge for me to continue on the right path that carries further freedom.

As this began to happen, and I found myself once again learning to be expressively honest with God and once again work on areas of repentance, he would continue to start unwrapping and exposing some things.  This spot is where he revealed that I was wrestling in the mud of life and adding to my own exhaustion from fighting the process.  I was allowing the weight of everything I kept tucking in my journey bag to weigh me down and suck me further into the mud pit.  It had become clear that God had placed me in the mud and I was missing the purpose of being there.  I am going to just insert what I previously wrote about the mud pit from Aug 5.

Lately, I have found myself wrestling in the mud of life. It is not a fun place to be for someone who desires things to be clean and orderly. As I began to ponder this realization, the need for pulling things out of the mud of my life that need to be cleaned up and to remove the weights that were weighing me down in the mud. God brought to mind there are benefits to time spent in the mud.

Mud draws out the impurities, exfoliates dead cells, relaxes sore muscles and joints, improves skin and skin conditions, relieves arthritic pain.

I began to realize it was as if God placed me in this mud for a reason. I can go with the process and reap its benefits or I can stay stuck and weighed down by the dirtiness of my life and the world around me. I have only been seeing the mud and not the benefits.

He wants to draw out the impurities of my life, remove the dead and sinful cells. He wants me to relax and trust in his process rather than fight it on my own. He wants to improve not only the inside of me from drawing out toxins but the outside of me that ultimately reflects Him. He wants nothing more than to ease and remove the pain and sting of life.

I get the sense that I am not the only one feeling the effects of the outside world and God is placing you in the mud to purify you as well. Is it easy? Absolutely not! I have failed at this miserably, I am not going to lie. I have got sucked into things, that have suffocated me because all I saw was the mud and circumstances. I am now left with allowing God to use the mud to do its work, and then pick myself up, wash myself off, and continuing forward.

I was recently reminded again of the passage in Ecclesiastes that reminds us there is a season and purpose for everything under heaven as well as Paul's reminder to not grow weary. We are to keep our eyes focused on the prize and the benefits of the difficult seasons. My prayer for today is that I can more clearly clear my eyes and regain more of the right focus.

Fast forward to last night.  As I mentioned earlier it took everything in me just to leave the house to go to the meeting with my friend.  Anxiety was causing panic attacks, nausea, headaches, chest pain, and you name it.  I had been wrestling with the idea for days and honestly was trying to find excuses to not go, yet I knew I should go.  I was torn and I was conflicted and now found myself in a position of being there and no way out.  We enter the lobby of the building and that would be as far as I could make it.  My friend Vickie tried to encourage me as well as one other lady there to go in.  All I could see was this wall I had to get through.  At one point while I am in tears Kevin came out to talk a few minutes and pray for me.  I was still paralyzed and gripped by fear, discouraged, and defeated.  After it had started I finally had mustered up the courage to find my way in and finding my way to the restroom first.  I would find a way through weakness and fear to find my way to my seat where I would sit through most of the worship, hypervigilant, and itchy while scratching at my skin from the intense amount of anxiety I was experiencing.  I wanted to run.  I wanted to hide.  I was too weak and too scared to do any of it.  I couldn't focus no matter how hard I tried.  Soon what would be the last song would begin just washing over me.  All I remember of the song was it said let your healing waters flow.  I started getting this sense of water flowing over me, while also starting to feel the air in the atmosphere change and blow through the room.  I was reaching a point, where Satan was losing and God was winning and breaking through to my heart.

As the song would play, I found myself scooting down to sit on the floor at my seat in the presence of God and find a way to close myself in with him.  He was reaching me and I was reaching back.  We were connecting.  After the song had finished there would be the harmonious and most angelic singing in the spirit.  The angels were there and voices and sounds blended in the most angelic way that you could not only hear but feel and see their presence.  This would go on for several minutes.  While I still was dealing with intense anxiety I was finally in a place of being able to start taking it all in.

The service then began to move into what was the most powerful yet unique experience I would ever see.  A line formed and one by one people would be anointed and prayed for by Lisa and Garret and then wade through the ankle-deep anointed water to Kevin on the other end who would also pray or release words over people.  I would sit and watch as one by one, people were being freed, touched, and healed by the power of God.  As the line seemed to near an end I mustered the courage to take a place at the end of the line.  Soon a few others would find a place behind me and I would step back out of the line from anxiety wondering if I would be able to try again.  I would sit and watch some more.  I was finally given one more chance as I would cautiously stand back and approach absolutely terrified out of my mind.  Fear was trying to blind me from the freedom that was about to take place.  This would be my moment of dealing with the stuff God was pulling from me in the mud.  He had been pulling stuff to the surface, now it was time to deal with what was no good and wash off what was valuable as he took me through this purifying process.

As I stepped up to receive prayer before entering the healing wading pool, God would begin to break and remove the junk.  There is not much I remember that was prayed the first round, but I got hit with the power and love of God, that was releasing all the anxiety and fear that had been blinding my view of God.  I in my own strength could not step into his realm, but he brought me into his realm.  He needed to do some heart surgery on the things that Satan was eating away at.  God would place me in a position for more that he was setting up for me to receive.  I never seem to have any concept of time when God puts me on his surgical table so to speak, but one thing I know is that there seemed to have been so much that took place as I tried to sit up and pull myself back together.  I was still weak and dizzy trying to come out of God's extra dose of anesthesia.  

Some time would pass and I once again had the privilege of watching others receive ministry and a touch from God.  I was given the opportunity to finish what I set out to do by walking through the healing pool.  As I stepped into the pool, I was immediately drawn to the warmth and comfort the water seemed to offer.  It was if, I could begin to feel my body draw in what God had to offer.  I remember I had one concern at one point and that was that I didn't want to fall as I was still feeling weak from the first encounter.  There was something about stepping into the pool that drew you into a different spiritual realm.  There was a holy presence and reverence in the pool.  It was as if there was no awareness of anything else around me and nothing else mattered.  That was so freeing to be in such a position to receive all that God had to offer in those moments.  I felt light, weak, and almost numb at times as I would stand there.  A feeling of walking on the clouds or the water and unable to steady my feet and body.  Every step taken and paused in the pool seemed to offer such different levels of healing and work as more things would continue to be extracted and released as God was releasing his oil and water over me.  Past trauma, its memories, and curses would be pulled away.  As this took place it was if I took a place on the side and watched the things leave from the back of my head.  I would see lightweight worn scraps of material, as well as some scraps of paper.  Some of the paper would have words, others would have pictures.  Everything seemed to represent something I watched it blow and fade into the distance until it could not be seen anymore.  There seemed to be so much, and I realized this was something I had longed for but wondered if I would ever experience.  The experience of the painful memories being gone with all of their details.  The words that were spoken, the visual reminders of events, and the cloth that seemed to represent tattered identity.  There was such a release in being able to release and have the weight of it released from me.  I saw the trauma bonding addiction links lay on the ground in the distance as I watched everything leave and I felt this sense of myself moving forward.

This was clearly one of those areas that had really grown with fear in my life due to some recurring triggers and situations.  Those events would bring all the trauma memories to the front.  Last night was the night for that to be broken once and for all.  I am not the identity of those events, but I am being formed into the identity of Christ.

There would be other moments of healing and God touching and healing my soul.  Satan wasn't done either.  He had tried once to distract with pain and wasn't successful.  His last and final trick up his sleeve was to cause blindness in my eyes and difficulty getting them to open or stay open.  Everything went black, I felt like I was snatched from a realm into a dark cave.  Fear came over.  Lisa and Garret were praying and Lisa was trying to calm me and get me to relax reminding me Satan was distracting and trying to stop my complete healing and freedom.  I don't recall or have a sense of how long it lasted, but I remember at one point trying to open my eyes and force them to focus.  At times I could only still see black.  I would begin seeing bright lights, then doubled blurred silhouettes of what appeared to be people.  Eventually, it all came back after what seemed to be such a terrifying moment.  That would lead to prayers over my home and apartment.  Anything that had entered to be removed.  I then said the bathroom as that had been the place where Satan and I had our encounter and his presence always seemed to hang.  As Garret would pray he could see it in the mirror.  I am not sure at what point but God pulled me back into his presence as the effects of that were being extracted and removed and God would let me rest with him and his angels.  While in that position, I saw the demon being pulled off the mirror like a gel cling sticker and as it became a spirit that would plummet headfirst out the bathroom window to a couple stories to the outside of the apartment below me.  I knew it was gone and gone for good.  It would be my place to walk it out moving forward.

I went as one person but left someone completely different.  I went as someone who had left fear of people re-enter as the state of the world and what hid behind the masks got to me and what was out of my control.  I failed to trust that God would have my back and always did even when the world is turned upside down.  I left fear slip in through a gift God had given me because I became focused on what I didn't seem to understand, rather than stay focused on God's purpose for his gifts.  I had let a relationship become a religion as I became consumed with not being able to live up to God's standards and slip back into the legalistic ways of my past.  All of these things that God could use for good, Satan had found ways to slip in and play his role.  He was gaining and seemed to be winning.  However, God never lets go of those he pursues.  He will place people to be intercessors.  He will pursue your heart.  He will offer his diving appointments and opportunities for continued healing and freedom.  Layer by layer he peels away the old stuff and exposes the new.  He will place you in the mud to let you wrestle or to accept his cleansing and purification.  I don't typically enjoy the process, but I sure enjoy the freedom and the feeling afterward.  I value the lessons once I learn them, and hope to continue to work on taking more notes and writings of the process.  Typically, it is through writing that God has a way of showing and revealing so to me that he wants me to see.  Then there are times he blesses me with the opportunity of my lessons being a blessing to others.  It can only happen when I allow him to clear my eyes, open my ears, and expose my heart in a transparent way before him.

I came home refreshed but exhausted.  I was tired, yet I was still feeling the excitement of freedom.  I didn't expect to wake in the middle of the night like I had been, but I did around 2:00.  I was experiencing a hot flash or something and coming out of the dream of reliving the moments with God.  I don't typically get them as intense as I did last night as I felt like my whole body was on fire.  I remember waking up and seeing a thickness of angels floating all around.  They were practically on top of each other.  I felt so peaceful.  I felt so protected.  It felt so angelic.  There was such reverence with them in the apartment, but mostly my room as that is where I could see them.  I sensed their presence everywhere though.  As I laid and just basked in the angelic presence, it was just confirmation, that I had found and received my breakthrough.  It took me over an hour before I would be able to go back to sleep, but the rest of the night seemed to just be peaceful and uneventful for a change.

I would greet my day and found myself engaging in spontaneous worship with Melissa Helser.  He would give me this vision of him pouring his oil over me.  There was also water as he showed me water can have two opposing forces.  One of great destruction and another of that of a calming and massaging effect.  He poured the oil first as it would draw the impurities to the surface, but act as a protective barrier and repellent to other things and forces from entering and destroying or causing chaos in the mind.  I realized the importance of his daily oil, to shield, protect, and repel what could be the destructive waters of Satan rather than the cleansing waters of God.  I feel like I was also shown how when we are not careful, something that could be from God could also be Satan to get us where he wants us till he has gained more control of a particular area in our life.  There is a verse that comes to mind in 1 Peter 5:8-9 that talks about being alert and mindful for Satan walks around looking for who he can devour.  It then says to stand firm and strong in your faith.  When we are not mindful and vigilant or even strong in our faith, we become easily deceived and an easy target to be devoured by Satan and his forces.  We must know what fire we are walking into and who is in the fire with us so that we don't get burned or consumed.  

So many lessons being played through my mind today, it almost seems hard to capture them all.  God is faithful to continue the work he started.  He is faithful to pursue the ones he loves as long as we allow him.  He provided those that would be the planks to build the bridge, then when the time was right, he provided those who would be willing to walk through and build the bridge to continue on to healing and freedom.