I want to thank each of you for your support, financially and with prayer over the past year and especially for the three mission trips that I went on in April and May of 2010. I have been so blessed by the people that I met on each of these trips and have been forever thrust further into my destiny with Father God. I want to share with you the testimonies of what God has been and is doing and how He has and is moving in, through and around me. I have learned so much and experienced so much over the past year that to just share the testimonies of what I saw on these trips feels cheap. I do not want to give you just that, I want to give you a taste of the goodness of God that I have had the honor and privilege of experiencing this last year. The testimonies that I experienced on the trips are wonderful but equally important is what He is doing in me, who He is molding me to be, and the dreams we are sharing together now, simply because that is His testimony in me. I simply want to share my heart with the people who I love and who have played such key roles in making me who I am today. So this is a piece of my most recent adventures with Papa God, the one who holds my heart in His.
Stepping into the fullness of my identity and destiny is wonderful. I have been on this journey of discovering who I am and how I fit into the Kingdom of God my whole life, but this past year I feel like I have finally discovered myself. One revelation about myself is that I love to teach people about the love of Papa God, how He is the epitome of love and we can never disappoint him. It sounds crazy right because I grew up with this thought that if I make bad choices then I’ll disappoint God and that is a bad thing to do, so it was really important to be a good little girl. Here’s the thing though, to be disappointed means that you were expecting a different result, but God knows the choices we’ll make and already has a plan for us, so He really can’t be disappointed. He knew Judas was a thief and yet made him treasurer. He knew Judas would betray Him and yet kept him on the inner circle of His disciples. He knew Peter would deny Him and yet made him the corner on which His church was build. He knew we’d reject Him and yet He died for us. All God wants is for us to come to Him and fall on our faces before him, repent or change our mindset and then forgive ourselves because He already forgave us, over 2000 years ago, mind boggling isn’t it?
This revelation of His forgiveness and love has been quite freeing for me, challenging too as I look at how I relate to others. He forgave us for everything that we’d ever do already, more than two thousand years ago. James 5:16 says confess your sins one to another and pray for each other that you may be healed. We do it so we can receive healing from the death that sin brings, not to tell God so He can decide to forgive us, He already did that. There is simply healing when we share our burdens and forgive each other and our selves. This is a beautiful thing. It is through this confessing, or sharing that we are able to join together with each other and with Him in an intimate relationship knowing that there is nothing that can separate us from His love, no action, no thought, nothing can separate us. The tough part is trusting in other people because we as broken people forget that there is no condemnation in Christ and we don’t know how to truly honor someone when they do bring us their brokenness and sin, because it has so rarely been exemplified.
It is one of my dreams to really learn how to express this part of God and His love. One of the things I discovered this year is that I LOVE leading people into an encounter with Him, through prayer, conversations, meditation, visions, or inner healing. It doesn’t matter the format, just that they attain a love encounter with the God of love, the one who died for them, so they could experience freedom, choice, love. One of the most life changing things I have learned is that love always has a choice. Bill Johnson explains it as the two trees in the Garden of Eden, God had to give Adam and Eve a choice for it to be love. They were given an opportunity to “fail” so that they could truly “succeed” and that is love. I have heard so many times that in order to succeed you must be willing to jump out there and fail, and it makes sense, if we live our lives in fear then where does that leave us? It leaves us in a mediocre lifestyle always dreaming about the ‘one day’ because we are too scared to jump into our hearts desires because we might fail.
I decided last summer that I was no longer going to live my life in fear. One of my life verses is 2 Timothy 4:7 which says, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.” This verse has meant so many different things to me through the years but this past summer it really hit me, if I am scared to do something and act based on that fear then I am submitting myself to the enemy. Once I had this revelation I decided to stop listening to fear and when I felt it rise up I realized it was the enemy trying to stop me from walking into my destiny. Some of my first decisions to break this cycle of fear were that I decided to apply for Bethel Atlanta School of Supernatural Ministry (BASSM), and get involved in the church I had been going to for almost a year but had yet to connect to anyone new because I was afraid, intimidated, and insecure because I didn’t know who I was. Going to BASSM was the best decision I have ever made, because it opened the door for God to rock my world in ways I never imagined He could.
I have never heard His voice more clearly or felt His presence like I do now. I am able to hear what He is saying to me and what He is saying about others, which enables me to give them a prophetic word, which is just God telling them something about themselves. It is not a scary thing because He only always has good things to say to us. I am also able to recognize Him speaking in lots of different ways, I get words of knowledge which is God showing me what is going on in other peoples bodies, or facts about them. Sometimes I get a pain in my body or a word pops into my head and it is something that God is doing to share that He knows and loves the person. Hearing and seeing Him in these new ways has furthered my love for Him and I am completely wrecked by His love now and there is absolutely no going back.
This past year has been many things for me, stretching, challenging, a year of discovering who I am by opening up my heart to His healing so my past not longer controls my future, and relearning thing I thought I knew but had wrong. It has been an awesome year of overcoming fear, in it‘s many different manifestations. About half way through the year I discovered that the fear actually took on a new manifestation when I started to respond by turning to God when I felt it. It shifted the feelings of fear to feeling awkwardness, which is simply the fear of man. So now I am learning that when I feel awkward I just have to pause and focus on God and who He is and then His love washes over me and I realize, I am loved and beautiful just as I am and that is truth, regardless of my emotions and I can stand on that. When I focus on His love then fear has to leave because, “perfect love casts out fear” 1 John 4:18. So when I get lost in His love, then the fear I felt has no choice but to leave.
My ever expanding dream for my life is to live a life full of the love of Papa God to abide in His presence. I dream about how it can be evident that He is always with me, like walking past a sick person and then they are healed. I dream about dwelling in His presence so much that everything I create carries His presence like the handkerchief’s and aprons that touched the apostle Paul and were taken to the sick and they were healed and evil spirits left them like in Acts 19:11-12. I dream about going to the nations and sharing the love of God with people, setting them free from the things that hold them prisoners. I have a huge desire to go to the places where the darkness of the enemy seems to be prevailing. It is those places where I want to go and shine the light of God’s love and watch Him restore that which has been stolen, heal what has been broken and radically love people into the abundant life He died to give them.
I dream about my art carrying His presence so that when people look at it, the walls around their hearts that they have built up to protect themselves are disarmed and the love of God can break into their souls and they will be rocked by the extravagant love of God and it will bring life to them. One of my favorite things about art is that it has the ability to break into the viewers hearts and they are able to find a visible expression for what is going on inside of them. The viewers can interpret their own meaning because art often takes on a life of it’s own, and everyone sees it differently, because it draws out of each of them different things. I want my art to carry both physical and emotional healing because it is what Papa God and I do together and healing is a part of His essence which can not be separated from Him. I want to create specific works for specific galleries/ stores and for the person who is going to walk in and see it. I want each of my pieces to express and release creativity, courage, hope and love always. I want to donate works to museums around the world to release the aspect of God that I carry, and I want to pray over each of my pieces for the things that the person receiving them is in need of. I plan to write books about what God is doing with me and use my photography to show the world what He shows me. His love is too big not to share it with people, I cannot hold it back anymore. I want to use my art to support my ministry as well as be ministry.
I have recently decided to jump into the dream of being a full time artist and continue in the second year program at BASSM. I know that the second year here will catapult me further me into my destiny and help me be able to walk in my dreams further. One way it will do so is that I will have the opportunity to travel with the Pastors on staff and serve them as they are serving other around the world and the US. I am very excited to be able to travel and serve under them, I know that what God has put inside of me will grow in extraordinary ways through their leadership and that excites me! I know this will happen in ever increasing ways because of how much it happened this past year on the three trips I had the honor of going on.
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