Tag: deliverance

life

Little By Little: A Deliverance Story (Possessing the Land of My LIfe Through Deliverance Ministry)

Omowunmi

2022 was a year of lament for me. At the beginning of the year, we moved out of our apartment home into a new house that would be my family’s forever home. The transition should have been a joyous one. Unfortunately for me, our family had just moved twice in the previous sixteen months. I lamented losing a sense of normalcy for myself and our children. It seemed no matter how hard I tried, I could not find my feet again after so many drastic changes.

We had left our first home behind, the dream home we purchased for our little family of four. The home that held all my children’s formative memories between the ages of one and three was no longer ours. The school and neighborhood where they had cultivated friendships and community connections for almost three years were now relics of the past. We left that home suddenly after it was attacked by gun violence and moved into an apartment. Then, we sold the house less than three months later.

My head was spinning from all the changes. And my heart broke more than a little bit once the house was officially no longer ours.

In our apartment, I had fought hard to make the rented space feel like our own. It started feeling like “home” to us around the fall of 2021, exactly one year after we moved in. I anticipated spending at least another six months to a year acclimating to our new reality before we would be ready to be home buyers again.

We did not get a second year in the apartment. Fifteen months into our life as renters, my husband informed me that we were moving into and purchasing his family home. His parents had it listed on the market, and the house was perfect for our rambunctious boys who desperately needed a yard of their own.

We left our apartment in January and were completely moved out by February 1st. A new home in a new city also meant a new school for our children. More changes led to more grieving; my poor heart could not seem to catch a break.

“I do not feel like myself.” These words escaped my lips time and again, throughout the year 2022. I leaned into my community, taking refuge in the sisterhoods that had been with me for all of my transitions. As my family life was changing, so were my friendships.

The connections that once acted as a place of refuge for me began to feel more like business transactions. It seemed I was only acceptable when I was on my “A-game.” For someone who was dealing with multiple curve balls in her life, my A-game was laughable at best. 2022 became the year of intentionally and continuously contending for my joy because so many things were determined to steal it.

By the end of 2022, I had spent several months feeling “unsafe” in previously close relationships. Consequently, I submitted myself for deliverance through the Issue-Focused Ministry offered by RTF. No matter how often I had prayed or tried to process my emotions with trusted friends, the feeling of being “terrorized” inside of my own skin had not yielded. It was time for more deliverance.

In those three hours with the Lord and my ministers, the Lord bulldozed every foundation that had been laid by fear, grief, and an orphan lifestyle. Word curses uttered by well-intentioned leaders in my life were replaced by God’s truth concerning me and my held-in fear. The freedom I had received in my time in Thorough Format had given me my voice back in a mighty way, but newly inflicted wounds told me that being muted was safer than saying the wrong thing. The Lord entered my story once again on December 14, 2022, and He revealed how committed He was to my continuous freedom. Even in the places I had deemed healed, the Lord showed me how much more healing He could accomplish on my behalf. As the weight of the grief I had carried dissipated, the Lord instead gave me boundless joy and feet that danced unashamed in His presence. 

Coming out of my time in issue-focused ministry felt like I could breathe again. I had held my breath for months in my life, unsure if it was safe to release what was pent up on the inside of me. As I received ministry for those areas of my life that held new wounding, the muzzle placed on my identity by fear was removed. I found my voice again. Thank you, Jesus!

In the months between my time in Thorough Format and my tune-up via Issue-Focused Ministry, the Lord began to press upon my heart this burden to be accredited to minister to wounded women. I started researching Christian counseling programs around me, but none were a good fit. I did not want to go back to school for another degree, but I had the desire to be properly trained to minister to women. Fortunately for me, God had a solution in progress already.

I never knew that I would get my opportunity to become a minister almost immediately after receiving ministry myself. Less than two weeks after my issue-focused ministry time, I expressed my desire to train to become an RTF minister to Pastor Pauline Ezell, who had ministered to me through both my RTF sessions. Before the end of the month, I had passed the online training for new prospective RTF ministers, and a week later I was registered to attend the in-person training and activation. 

I had prepared myself for my journey to becoming an RTF issue-focused minister to take upwards of three months. The Lord took me from being an IFM receiver to becoming a prospective minister within 23 days. 

By the time I attended the in-person training and activation on February 2nd through the 4th, I was still within the first 60 days of walking out my new healing and deliverance. I did not realize that the Lord intended to give me more land to possess so quickly in my journey to total freedom.

My time in training was nothing short of supernatural. The Lord met me personally in surprising and miraculous ways. He even sent a snowstorm to ensure that I would have the opportunity to be in the ministry room with just the right people. My small group partner and I ministered freedom to one another in ways neither of us expected. For me, I walked away even freer from the spirit of performance and fear that had almost rendered me ineffective. I stood up, settled in my emotions, and bold in my identity. I went home with eyes that see clearly and assurance of my place in God and His family.  

Finding out I had passed my training to become an RTF Minister was simply icing on the cake. By the time my weekend in Nashville was over, I was floating on air. The things that previously weighed me down had no hold on me. I was living in the afterglow of being with The Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. 

The joy of knowing that I get to partner with God to do for others what He has done for me through the ministry of Restoring The Foundations is a joy I cannot fully describe. I am called to women, and being able to join hands with them as they walk into more profound healing and freedom is an honor. 

Once again, I am living in the aftermath of ground that has been newly leveled. High places built in memorium of the pain of my past have been turned to rubble before the Almighty God. After spending years in turmoil, just dealing with the pain of brokenness, the Lord broke up the fallow ground of my life to reveal rich, fruitful soil that can bear good seeds for His kingdom. Pain and trauma that once devoured God’s promises from the ground of my life have lost all dominion over me. I am free to become everything the Lord desires for me to be. My heart is purified and my hands are clear to carry any and all assignments the Lord chooses to place in them.

Coming out of three rounds of deliverance ministry has armed me with the tools to deliver myself from the clutches of hell, and to ask for help when I need reinforcement. The ground under my feet feels like I am planted on the Solid Rock once again. I will not be shaken. Thanks to my new tools, I can see with clarity all the places where the enemy had stolen territory from the promised land of my life. Betrayals, traumas, word curses, soul-ties, and partial forgiveness all left me living at the mercy of demonic trespassers who played freely in my emotions…until deliverance came knocking.

Today and forevermore, I am recovering every bit of the promised land of my life by the grace of God. Hell cannot have another piece of me. Not now. And not ever again. 

life

Unbroken: Retrieving the pieces of my identity and finding my way to wholeness

Omowunmi

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.