When Insecurity Dies and Love Lives

Around 9 months ago, I was sitting in my room listening to music and pouring my heart out to God. After two years of ministry school, I had a big decision to make about what I would do for my third year internship. Being prone to introspect and incredibly hard on myself, I thought over all the areas I still needed to grow in, all areas of struggle and weakness and other various components of why I didn't feel qualified for many of the options available to me. Around 20 minutes into my self-evaluation, Jesus decided to save me from myself and interrupted my thoughts. He said, "Heather, You rob others when you devalue what I’ve placed inside of you; because I want to use you to change their lives and you don’t believe you have anything to offer" I was like, oohh...burn. Over the last 9 months God has not let me get away from the lesson he began teaching me that night. What happens when I am not continually choosing to view myself the way God does? What happens when I only see with my natural eyes but don't ask for heaven's perspective? Sometimes we get so caught up in our own emotions that we become really self-centered. A sense of false humility can form when we allow our thoughts to become more focused on our weaknesses, inability and lack rather than Gods power, strength and faithfulness. It is not only painful for me when I think this way, but it hurts and robs those around me. When I am choosing to live in a place of insecurity rather than my true identity, it prevents me from loving people the way I was created to. I don't realize the value of my thoughts, words and actions and this can cost others a great deal. Insecurity is placing your identity in what you feel and what others think rather than what is true. True humility is having the right view of God and how he sees you, and living from that place. We cannot love others from a place of insecurity, because we will always attach a need to the love we are pouring out. We need that person to value or affirm who we are, and if they don't, we can grow bitter or resentful...which is the exact opposite of our original intention; to love. God told me, "Love with a need attached to it will not produce the results your heart desires." Love has the power to heal and transform people. We were all created to do something that no other person on the planet could ever accomplish. But when I don't know who God says I am and recognize what he's placed in me, I will always want to be someone else. When I live my life in insecurity because I am not somebody else, I cannot offer others the very thing inside me that could change their lives. We were created to love and to transform the world through that love. It's time we learn to love God and let Him love us and show us who we are so we can love ourselves and then love others. It's time for insecurity to die so that we can become who God created us to be.

Beauty for Ashes

So, it's four in the morning and my heart won't let me sleep. There are two very real realities going on simultaneously that I feel a complete lack of words to describe...but I will try. I have heard it said (though I can't remember where) that if you find yourself thinking more about the past than dreaming of the future, you have already begun to die. Tonight I find myself in a strange state where scenes from my past keep popping into my mind. Things that I once had and have lost; things that I never had and have since found. Memories that make me laugh, and more that make me cry. Love that I thought I knew only to find out it wasn't what I had thought. Pain I knew all to well that has shaped me into who I am today. As I recount the various chapters of my life I wonder...how did I end up here?? I am so far from the girl I once was. I have the most amazing opportunity to be amongst the most passionate people I have ever met who are literally going to change the world...and I can't believe God got me here. I used to wake up everyday and think "I know there is more to life than what I'm experiencing...there has to be more than this." Now I wake up and think, "This is exactly where I am meant to be, this is what I was created for." One of my favorite verses is Romans 8:28, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." I look back at some of the things in my past, and I know they were not a part of God's original design for my life. Love is a choice, and God loves us enough to give us freewill. With that comes the risk that we will choose things that God never intended to be a part of our lives. But his Grace is so amazing, that at any point we can turn our hearts to him, and in His mercy and Grace he will take every hurt, every pain, every lost thing we thought we might never recover and use it for the good. It completely amazes me, and tonight it has my head spinning with awe and gratitude at what God has done in my life. As equally as my heart is pained for the way it once was, it is filled with overwhelming joy with the thought of the beauty that God is going to make from the ashes. So as I lay in bed with my heart pounding and my wheels spinning I thought I would take the time to write out some of my thoughts. The word testimony comes from the hebrew word "do again"...meaning what he has done for me he can do for another. He uses everything. He wastes nothing. The second we position our hearts towards God there will be no struggle that was in vain. There will be no mistake that won't be used to teach another. There will be no experience that he wont use to change the world. And he will bring us to places we cannot even imagine, to do things we cannot even fathom. If we could only see what God sees. It is time to dream...and to dream big.

Psalm 126
"When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dreamed.
Our mouths were filled with laughter,
our tongues with songs of joy.
Then it was said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.
Restore our fortunes, LORD,
like streams in the Negev.
Those who sow with tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with them. "

The Journey's Only Just Begun.

One year ago I faced the biggest decision of my life. I heard God say, "Trust me; you're whole life is about to change." Before a belief can become an integral part of who you are, it must be tested. I trust God. I believe he provides for all my needs and always has the best in store for me. Those beliefs were tested and tried when he asked me to leave everything and follow Him into the unknown. Leaving all my comfort, all my security, all I have ever known and loved, I embarked on the scariest most exhilarating journey of my life; full abandonment to the call of God.

When I arrived in Redding California, I had no friends, no money, no connections, no car (long story)...all I had was a promise from God that he would take care of me. If I had to sum up this year in just a few words, it would go something like..."Everything I have always needed and wanted that I never even knew existed." I have been given the most amazing opportunity anyone could ever ask for; an opportunity to change the world and live a life without limitations or impossibilities.

I have learned so much this year that words could never express. I have experienced things I never even knew were possible. I have come to know God as Father. He cares about my every desire and he takes care of my every need. He can be trusted and he knows what I need better than I ever could. I am not ready for this year to end. I am not ready to say goodbye to some of the most amazing, beautiful, passionate people I have ever met in my entire life. On the other hand, my heart longs for home. I miss my family and friends more and more each day. I am happier than I have ever been, but I cry more than I ever have. It's a season of moving on from a past that shaped who I was. Its a season of new beginnings and stepping into who I was called to be all along. As much as I want to go back home to my family and friends for the summer, I feel like what God's doing in me here isn't over just yet. He is asking me once again to trust Him and stay in California. I can't see what's in store next, but I trust He can. He has a target in sight that I can not see. It's a season of being bent and stretched like a bow and arrow until I am perfectly aligned and God releases me to fly.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." -Isaiah 55:8

The World Doesn't Need More Religion; It Needs an Encounter with the Living God.

It's been awhile since I've had the motivation to sit down and put words to all that I am learning and experiencing. Sometimes I get frustrated with my lack of discipline, but I also know that there is a divine timing to all things. Sometimes a word spoken prematurely can't bare the fruit for which that word was intended to produce. I believe there are words inside of me waiting to be released, and when the timing is right they will go out and transform hearts. I trust that God is preparing hearts to receive those words which he is maturing inside my spirit during these months away from home. I will say this; my whole life I had this deep longing in my heart for something which I had never experienced, but somehow my spirit knew existed. I knew there had to be more to life than simply going through the motions. I was always a deeply analytical/philosophical person; but all my analysis came up empty. It was out of this place of reaching the end of my ability to produce the answers I so earnestly desired that I encountered God, and my life was never the same.
Often times I will talk about God, and I get this response, “Wow…you’re really religious, huh?” It’s in this moment that my heart and brain want to explode with such a fervent desire to express the inexpressible. For centuries, people who truly love God have gone around trying to undo the stigma that is attached to “religion.” But religion was not God’s idea…it was man’s. Religion is what happens when you take something so far beyond your comprehension and you try to minimize it into something you can control, a thing us humans are infamous for. When we think of religion, we think of restrictions, limitations, and conformity. It breaks my heart, because this is the exact opposite of what a relationship with God actually looks like. In reality, it looks like watching the deepest desires of your heart being realized and fulfilled. It’s overwhelming peace amidst a world full of chaos and suffering. It’s empowerment to do the things you always dreamed of doing and never thought possible. It’s complete freedom to be who you were created to be without caring what the world thinks. It’s like the feeling of being in love without the fear of being hurt. It’s not some sort of spiritual mind trick…it’s the most real thing you will ever experience. It’s not something you can grasp by human reasoning or logic alone…it’s something you need to experience firsthand to understand. And it’s something that is possible to anybody who is curious enough to ask for it. We pick up our cell phones and communicate with people on the other side of the world without questioning how that even works, we simply believe because the person on the other end picks up. What if God picked up the phone? What if it was so real that you could not deny it happened?
I get overwhelmed when I think about writing because I know I don’t have the words to do God justice. I can tell you about the blind man who was baptized and came out of the water with his sight restored, people who had terminal cancer and were radically healed, the paralyzed woman who stood up out of her wheelchair on the street and walked for the first time in eight years after being hit by a car, or the countless times God has spoken to me in dreams and visions and then come through, doing exactly what he promised, bringing me to exactly where he wanted me. But my words alone aren’t enough. At the same time I know that what is living inside of me is so powerful and it’s just crying to be released upon a generation that so desperately needs it. We have such a high value for freedom in this country, yet so many people are walking around in bondage to things that they don’t have the ability to change in their own strength. In bondage to lies that the world masquerades as the truth. In bondage to their circumstances, their illnesses, their limited perspectives. I am just trusting that these aren’t just words, but the spirit of the living God would actually breathe life into my words and he would draw you into an encounter with him. For those that don’t know whether they believe or not, I pray God would touch you personally; that it wouldn’t be something you take my word for, but that you would experience His goodness and His love for yourself. If you made it this far…you didn’t read this by accident :) I pray that you experience everything I have experienced and THEN some.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” –Matthew 7:7-8

The Paradox of a Good God in a World of Suffering

People will often attempt to refute the existence of a loving God because in their limited human capacity, they cannot logically wrap their minds around the concept that he can exist amidst a world filled with so much suffering. We don’t argue or question the existence of suffering in the world. Suffering is something we know to be true because we see it all around us, we feel it, we experience it personally, and therefore it becomes a reality. But what if God’s Goodness was something you could experience in the same way? What if his goodness became such an intense reality that we could not argue it or dispute it? How do you live in that kind of paradoxical reality? That is what happened to me; I experienced Gods unimaginable goodness amidst a world plagued by suffering and thus began the journey to discovery how it all works together and what implications does that have on my future.
The thing is that we are human, and while God has given us the ability to think, analyze and reason, we can never fully see thing s through the lens of eternity. God exists outside the limits of time. Our past, present and future are all viewed equally and simultaneously because God is eternal and in his domain time does not exist. He knows where we have been, where we are now and where we are going.
God is bigger than the suffering that goes on in this world. While he could step in at any moment and sovereignly put an end to it, more often than not he will choose to use people to be his hands and his feet. Why did he choose to do it this way? I can’t answer that, however there are a few things I am learning that help me to understand things better.
I often struggle with the concept of free will; it’s something that makes my head spin and my brain hurt. But I look at it this way…if you forced someone to marry you and love you, how much would their love be worth? God has given us choices and ultimately I do believe we have free will. We were created to love God, to know him and be used by him. But he gave us the ability to choose NOT to love him, because only then does his love have any real value. God didn’t want a world full of robots, so he gave us a choice. So what happens to a world full of people who were created to love God, to know him and be known by him, but fail to understand what they were created for? In every human heart God has placed a hunger to be known and loved. It’s more than a hunger, it’s a need. The root of suffering is a need that goes unmet, which then spirals out of control. People go through their lives knowing there is something missing; they spend their entire lives searching for something else to fill that void that only the love of God can fill. The harder people search and seek outside themselves, the more suffering prevails. What ends up happening is you get a population of hurting, broken people, but that’s not the way that God intended for it to be. He is looking for people who are willing to partner with him to attack the suffering through his goodness. To show people who they really are and who they were created to be.
Now I don’t want to insinuate that world change can only come about by people who know God. There are plenty of people in the world who do not know God and they have a heart to see an end to suffering. There are people that make a huge positive impact on society who don’t believe in God at all. But people will always be limited in what they can achieve on human effort alone in the simple fact that they only have eyes to see what is in front of them. Hayfords Bible handbook states it this way, “Time is like a parade that man sees only a segment at a time. But God sees time in it’s entirety.” Without knowing God, you can address a need, you can promote a cause, but you are still limited to only being able to see that one segment of the parade. When you decide to partner with God, he actually gives you eyes to see through the lens of eternity. He gives you divine insight into people’s hearts, how he has created them, how he wants to use them and how to set them free. You are treating not just the symptom, but the disease itself. The amazing thing is that God has the ability to take the worst suffering in our lives and use it for the good, enabling us to make a huge impact in the lives of others.
For school I had to choose from one of the many options of various outreaches where we would basically go out into the community and share the love of God with people. Our goal wasn’t to go out and preach religion or convert people; it was simply to be a living example of God’s love. I prayed over which outreach God wanted me to be a part of and decided on one that reaches out to women in a drug rehab facility. Having grown up around addiction, I really have a heart to see people set free. There were times growing up when I would cry out to God asking him how he could allow something so painful and so destructive to tear apart my family. No rehab, treatment facility, medication or therapy could fix my family until God stepped in and changed everything. Out of that suffering I have a huge testimony of Gods goodness and his ability to restore that which was thought at one point to be irreparable. I sat in this room of about 25 women and I could barely contain my emotions. These were women with amazing gifts, women with potential, women with destinies. In that moment, I knew God had a plan and a purpose behind every negative thing that had every happened to me. He redeemed my suffering by allowing me to be an instrument of hope to these women. The Hebrew root for the word “testimony” is “do again.” I realized that in sharing my testimony with these women it was a prophetic declaration that what God did for me, he would do again for them. And in that moment the paradox of a the goodness of God amidst a world of suffering began to make complete sense to me. I realized that this is what I was created for; to bring the goodness of God into the darkest places so that God can redeem it with his love, seeing both what lies behind and what lies ahead. This was only day one of my outreach, but as I hugged these women goodbye, with tears and hope in their eyes, I knew I was exactly where God wanted me to be. I was flooded with the revelation that no matter what I faced, God knew where I was going, and if I only listen to his voice; he will lead me where he desires, for he is a good God.

Romans 8:28

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Where's Your Focus?

I have been listening to a lot of teachings and doing a lot of reading over the past month here. I wish I had heard some of these things a long time ago, it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary pain and heartache. I wanted to just share some things I read in a workbook I am working through called, “Basic Training for the Supernatural ways of Royalty” by Kris Vallotton. The workbook goes along with the actual book which I have yet to read; but the concept is understanding your identify as a redeemed child of God. Basically, it teaches you how to walk out who you were created to be rather than submitting to the standards that the world tells you to live by. I’m just going to pull portions directly from the book, because it’s so good, Kris is talking about what we believe becoming our reality…

“The first principle of belief to consider is this: that which you focus on will determine your reality. Every day, all day long, our minds are receiving information from the world around us and interpreting our experiences. Our minds filter out that which we have learned to be irrelevant and enable us to focus in on what is most important. ..”
He goes on to talk about the connection between our imaginations, our thoughts and our hearts.
“ That which fills our daydreams and our thoughts - that which is important to us - is connected to the heart, which is the seat of our emotions and desires…This explains why whatever we focus on will become our reality, for that which captures our attention, focus, and imagination will fill our hearts, that which fills our hearts will fill our lives, for life flows from the heart.”
“What I am realizing about many of us is that we spend much of our lives reacting to what we don’t want to be instead of responding to the call of God on our lives. We waste a lot of energy trying not to be something. In order to not be something, I have to keep it in front of me so I can avoid it. The crazy thing is that I reproduce what I imagine. If I see what I don’t want to be, just envisioning it causes me to reproduce it…we break out of this prison by responding to the call of God on our lives and meditating on his vision for us.”
Here he is specifically talking about bitterness and jealousy…
“The point here is that as long as our focus is locked on what we or other people have done or not done, our focus cannot be locked on what we care called to do and what God is doing. Forgiveness is a vital step in repenting of our wrong focus. The lie we believe when we fixate on that which other people have done or have not done to us, as well as that which we have done or not done, is that these things are a greater reality than the reality of that which God has done or will do for us.”

After reading this, I really started to pay attention to what I allowed to consume my thoughts. It says in proverbs 4:23 "Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life." After reading this, I realized that guarding my heart actually begins in my mind. What I allow to penetrate my thoughts will eventually penetrate my heart, and my heart determines the course of my life. We don't typically consider this when we start to relive the past in our minds, or focus on how we've been hurt, or worry about what someone might be thinking about us. It’s one thing to have a fleeting thought, we’re only human. You might not be responsible for the fleeting thought, but you are responsible for whether you choose to entertain it for an extended period of time. Kris talks about the irony of us actually reproducing the very thing we are trying to avoid. Often times we end up thinking ourselves into a state of discouragement, insecurity or anxiety that actually results in missing the solutions to problems when they come; keeping us trapped in situations we are desperate to be freed from. You can usually determine whether something is worth focusing on by the fruit of those thoughts. Does it solve a problem? Make you feel good about yourself? Make you anxious? Give you hope? Does thinking about this make me feel closer to God or further away from God? I would challenge you to take notice of what happens when you make a conscious decision to change your focus. The battle is won in the mind.

"Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done." - Philippians 4:6

A Drop from the Head to the Heart...

So I have put off writing for a number of reasons. One, I am learning and experiencing so much, it’s difficult to collect and condense my thoughts, emotions and revelations in to a blog-friendly piece of writing. There is a long trail of events, struggles and breakthroughs and I would love to share them all…but you have to start somewhere right? I’m going to start with Psalm 37:23...

“The Lord directs the steps of the Godly. He DELIGHTS in every detail of their lives.”

Now a common theme since I've arrived at Bethel seems to be that God more than just loves his children, he delights in them. It was easy for me to believe God loved me, but delighted in me? I had a hard time with that. There are people you love, but it's almost because you have to. You don’t necessarily delight in everybody you love. I think I always saw God as loving me because he had to, even though I didn't really deserve it. I never imagined God delighted in me. I was really struggling with fear and anxiety the first two weeks I was here. I ended up having a conversation with the people I live with and one of them said, “ I feel like this is going to be a year of really discovering your core beliefs about God; how you see him and how you believe he sees you.” I realized how crucial what you believe about God and the way that he sees you is, because everything you do flows out of that belief. Do you believe God is actually good all the time? Do you believe he loves you desperately? Do you believe he actually delights in you? I almost felt crushed beneath the burden of my own logic and my false beliefs about God. I went to my bedroom after that conversation and decided to write down verses in the bible that talk about God delighting in me. I thought, "This is so cheesy, but something's gotta change."

Psalm 37:23
“The Lord directs the steps of the Godly. He DELIGHTS in every detail of their lives.”

Psalm 149:4
“For the Lord DELIGHTS in his people; he crowns the humble with victory.”

Zephaniah 3:17
“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great DELIGHT in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”

I went to school the next day and the teaching was on prophesy. At the end of the teaching, Kris (the one teaching) had us all stand up and partner off with someone we didn't know, hold hands, pray, and ask God for a prophetic word for that person. So this guy is holding my hands and we're praying and then he starts laughing and says, "Okay, I got a clear word from God! He really wants you to know that he delights in you! That this is just a season where he wants to hold you in his arms and show you what that means." I could tell from the intensity in this kids eyes he had just heard the voice of God so clearly it actually shocked him. THEN we break into revival groups and we do this exercise where we each write our name on a piece of card board and then they collect all the pieces and pass them out again, name down, so you cant see whose it is. Our revival group pastor tells us to ask God for a prophetic word and write it on the card board and then pass it to our right, and continue doing that until they have made it all the way around the room. I was thinking, "This is stupid." But I really asked God to give me words and I wrote whatever I heard on every piece of cardboard. For one I heard "Delight" so I wrote it down. Then they collected them and passed them back to us. When I got mine back, I flip it over and saw the word DELIGHT, in my own hand writing...I had written it on my own piece not knowing it was mine! At this point I can actually sense a shift happening on the inside. For the next two days I felt so overwhelmed with a feeling I can only compare to falling in love. It changes everything; how you view yourself, how you view others, how you view your problems and the future. I went to worship last night and I couldn't stop smiling. I was thinking "Wow, you actually do delight in me..." As I am thinking this, they start playing Cory Asbury's song "Where I belong" The bridge of that song just repeats, "Delight in me, delight in me, delight in me." I felt like my heart was going to explode, I had never experienced anything like it before in my life. My heart came into a new understanding of what my logic was trying to argue. Nobody could have convinced me with scripture or theology, I needed the experience. Experience unlocks mystery, it allows us to perceive things with our whole beings rather than just our minds. It doesn't take believing something to experience it. It simply takes wanting to believe something, and the willingness to say "Okay God, show me...I need to know this for myself." So ask God how he sees you, you will be surprised at his willingness to show you. You are in for the experience of a lifetime!