For the last four years, I have been on this intentional journey of undoing what trauma has done to me. It started in 2017 with understanding how my fear of failure and fear of success had robbed me of the opportunity and wealth that God wanted to bestow on us. It continued with deconstructing my poverty mindset and limited understanding of money and wealth and their roles in the life of a follower of Christ.
To give you the cliff’s notes version – fear had me convinced that God could not do much with my life because inadequacy kept telling me the same lies – you are not smart enough or qualified for the positions that can move you out of poverty and lack. God has shot those lies down and I now understand that I am uniquely equipped for all things that God has put in my hands and through Him I have the power to make wealth.
As I was flourishing in the truth that God has blessed me with every spiritual blessing and has also given me the power to make wealth, I hit another previously broken piece of my identity: anxiety/panic attacks. After a traumatizing event in 2019, my previously calm demeanor vanished and I became a quaking shell of my former self. For several months (February through September 2019) I was harassed by a fear that manifested into physical symptoms. As I experienced insomnia, paralyzing panic attacks, racing thoughts, and what I can only describe as demonic oppression set against my mental health, I sought God in therapy, in prayer, and in community, for deeper answers beyond coping mechanisms. What God revealed was how fear and trauma had set me up for a life built primarily on worry rather than the goodness and trustworthiness of God. He also revealed the extent to which I had allowed a borrowed title to define my entire identity when WHO I am in Christ cannot be quantified by what I do for a living.
Since February 2019, the Lord’s primary concern has been building in me a DEEP and unshakeable understanding of who I am and what He had in mind when He created me. Since then, I have been purposefully challenging myself to uncover undiscovered parts of identity, the parts of myself that I have neglected or allowed pain and trauma to bury or misshape. For example, because of my previous loss of fellowship and sisterhood, it took me a while to understand that the Lord created me to champion and provide a godly community for other women. The depth of my pain in that area of my life was actually a clue as to what I was called to be – a champion of sisterhood, godly accountability, and community for women.
In February 2020, almost a year to the date of my most traumatic adult life event, I shared my newest book with a room full of women who love, support, and believe in the work of the Lord in my life. The moment was deeply healing and absolutely God-ordained. For the last year, I have been on the journey of uncovering what it looks like for me to walk fully in this lane as a woman with a voice, a story, and a heart for healing other women. There have been both strides and hiccups. I have seen triumphs and I have encountered triggers. As I took 100 steps forward in growth, I would periodically find myself walking backward as triggers and old soul wounds exploded on the scene like grenades – and attempt to decimate all of my growth and healing.
It is only fitting that in this month of February of 2021, the Lord decided on the anniversary of my book launch to catapult me into the stratosphere of healing, wholeness, and full deliverance. For three days, I had the opportunity to partner with and submit to the Holy Spirit as my Heavenly Father showed me in real time who I am – without the false lenses of old traumas, false identity, and past wounding. It felt like God Himself stepped into the room, scalpel in hand, and performed the most precise open heart surgery ever attempted in the history of medical science. He knew exactly which valves and vessels needed His touch. Imagine God reconstructing a new heart for me, one piece at a time until the new heart looks nothing like the old one. Yet, this new heart is so perfectly suited to the body it inhabits, it is as if the old heart had been returned to perfect health and re-implanted in the same body – same DNA, perfect shape, and size, without all the sickness and disease.
I told my sisters that this new life and level of freedom is so foreign; it is reminiscent of being a baby learning to walk. Everything feels wildly different from this position of healing. I am learning a new way of thinking, operating, and viewing myself and the world. I question my thoughts more than I have ever done (is this true or is this my wounding trying to impose an ungodly belief on me/what does God say about this thought I have about myself/how did Jesus meet me in this past painful memory?).
I am doing a lot more of taking thoughts captive and forcing them to submit to Christ than I have done in my thirty-seven years. But, it is strangely freeing – this new habit of questioning and examining every single thought before agreeing with it. I am shedding layers of triggered and traumatized behavior and coping mechanisms. I am undoing decades of the enemy’s attempts to keep me captive – in Christ but unable to flourish, free-ish rather than free indeed.
Wholeness has been the fight of my life. With each new painful experience, the enemy added new levels to the tower he constructed as an altar to my pain. Each soul wounding beckons me to worship my pain, rather than fixing my eyes on Jesus. A genuine relationship with Christ provided my first fighting chance at freedom. Continual self-reflection, submission to the Holy Spirit, and godly accountability allowed me to put my feet to my prayers for soul healing. Therapy, confession, and repentance ushered me to a new level of growth and maturity in this journey to freedom. But these three days, at the foot of the cross, with the help of capable and equipped deliverance ministers have catapulted me past any level of freedom the old me could ever hope to reach.
I am living in the aftermath of ground that has been newly leveled. Every altar built to pain, trauma, and wounding has been blown to smithereens. Every ground, hardened in the comfortability of “just dealing with the pain” has been tilled and tilled again, broken up until the soft, fruitful soil of an unhindered heart has been revealed. My life is good soil, waiting to receive the seeds that God has been scattering for 37 years with mixed results – because pain and trauma like hungry birds would often devour God’s truth before it could bear good fruit.
Armed with the knowledge of where the enemy has stolen vital pieces of my identity (every childhood and adulthood trauma, every betrayal, every giving away of myself in hopes of receiving love, every curse uttered from my lips or those of others that became self-fulfilling prophecies), I am on the offense to pursue, overtake, and recover ALL from the enemy. Hell cannot have one piece of me. Not now. And not ever again.
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