Research proves that being validated helps us to better regulate our emotions, thus showing us the value of being truly heard and also the importance of lending our own ears to listen to others.
In today’s video, I take a look at how the children of God were heard by Him while they were enslaved in Egypt, and how it impacted their hearts to have been heard. It is also understood that being able to share your own grief with others from struggles in life leads to a healed heart. God obviously created us this way and He chooses to validate our pain just as He did with the Israelites!
Lifting You In Prayer
I decided to write a prayer for you.
My prayer will begin with asking the Lord to bless you. I ask Him to bless you with His peace, abundant grace and joy in this season, and to bring His loving tangible presence to you where you are at right now.
I ask our Holy God to command His angels to provide for you, provision for your protection and your families protection, provision financially out of the abundance of His Kingdom, provision of favor over you as you walk out God’s plan for you, and anything else that you are needing provision for that will aide you as you live to glorify Him and love others well.
I ask the Lord to bring His healing presence to you for healing with any illness, disease or ailment you might be experiencing. I command that any evil spirit that might be amplifying pain or issues within your body be removed in Jesus’ name. And if the source of your illness is the hand of the enemy, I command that evil spirit to leave your presence as well.
I ask Jesus to restore your faith and hope in Him to be your great Healer once again, no matter how fast or long it takes for your healing to take place. I ask that He would lead you to continue by faith to ask for your healing and the healing of others in your life that need it.
I ask the Prince of Peace to cover your heart, your soul and spirit with His calming presence, providing you understanding and clarity within your circumstances and removing any evil spirit from your presence that is intensifying fear, anxiousness, chaos, hopelessness and despair.
May the King of all kings rule over your entire heart, revealing to you the parts of your heart that He has yet to have permission from you to heal and provide comfort to. And as He reveals these areas may you have His strength to release them into His hands. I pray that our God heals all of your soul and heart wounds.
I ask that you would be blessed with wisdom abundantly, where day to day matters become easier and the burdens you carry become delightfully light.
May God bring you awareness of the areas in you that need His gentle correction. And may He reveal to you any deception that is holding you back from Him and His truth. I ask the Lord to set you free more and more in that truth and in Him.
I pray over all your relationships in your life, asking for protection over them, asking for clear communication within them, and asking that you would have more understanding in how to have healthy connections with others.
May your heart for the Lord continue to burn for Him. May you hunger to know God more and more and seek to experience His presence deeper as you make time for Him. And as a result of being in His presence, may His love in your heart encourage and enable you to love all around you well.
In this vlog episode, I share in detail my struggle with anxiety and depression while fundraising in order to move overseas with my husband. It was not wise of me to ignore these mental health issues.
However, I hoped with so much in me that after growing stable in our new country I would not have these struggles so intensely. Three months into our time abroad I discovered how wrong I was… yet God had a plan with it all!
A valuable lesson of many that I have learned within my trauma therapy, is that I had focused on the wrong wounds of some of my issues.
Not that those wounds I was focused on did not negatively impact me, but in focusing on just those particular sets of wounds I overlooked a crucial one. I did that for a few reasons. One, I thought that I had already healed with that wound, and two, on recalling the event that caused the wounding I did not feel great emotion with it.
So, I was surprised when the Lord allowed that wound in me to be poked and prodded in real- time to get me to realize how much it was still there and still impacting so much in my life.
When I was made aware of this I realized why I neglected this deep wound for so long.
The wound happened in childhood, so plenty of days and months and years had gone by without addressing it. And when I became triggered with it in the present, I had no way to link that trigger back to this particular wound because I had succeeded at burying it deep within my heart.
It felt like this wound was behind the strongest and largest locked door with chains and padlocks wrapped around it so that no one, not even myself, could get in. My mind had learned, all too well, how to guard the most vulnerable area I had within me. And over time this built-up defense even kept me out and unaware of the damage it was causing in my life.
The time to address this wound was in His perfect timing and it had to be addressed after many other wounds and traumas were healed and dealt with. So when I began to develop panic attacks all over again last year, I had nowhere else to point to as the culprit but the one remaining untouchable wound.
Yet the Lord knew how to unlock that door and bring healing to that tender part of my heart.
After the healing took place and I was made aware of what He was doing behind that bolted door, my mind quickly ran through different memories where I had allowed that wound to cloud my judgment or made difficult situations with people that much harder.
It was liberating to discover this sorely blind spot I had with me for many years. And even more liberating to now be healed of it. And it made all the more sense of why the enemy came at me hard during this healing process. The enemy would no longer have this wound to use against me and my relationships and the purpose God has for me.
Without that wound coloring my interactions with people and family, I now feel free and fearless and the person God has always intended for me to be that much more.
Do you have a vulnerable area in your heart, a deep wound you know is there that is hungry for healing as well? Let me encourage you to continue to take that to God and ask Him for healing. And friend, God wants that wound healed more than you know and He will provide a way for healing to be made.
Learning how to calm our anxiety is one thing, but understanding what habits we might have that are contributing to our struggle with anxiety is a whole other thing.. so naturally, I had to make a video about it!
If you tend to struggle with anxiety, and have been for a long period of time, your brain may have unfortunately learned to work out of your “fight, freeze, or flight” part as your default mode. And in order to not be so anxious all of the time, we can and need to retrain our brain to be more calm and not on alert all the time. Avoiding these 7 bad habits will help with that!
There are plenty of difficult passages of Scripture within the Bible. And reading how God hardened the Pharaoh’s heart, the same Pharaoh God sent Moses to confront, is definitely one of them.
In this video, I share how learning about and knowing the heart of God from reading the Bible in its entirety will give us a better understanding of how to interpret passages that point to an assumption about God that is not true. I could have used many more passages from God’s Word to help with this, but I chose to make this a simple explanation. Hope this encourages and blesses you!
In this episode on my mental health journey as a Christian, I am sharing with you how a decision to return abroad as missionaries and the start of that transition, along with other unforeseen factors, triggered a relapse with my mental health.
There was a fear that I could relapse, but I had no idea that I would be triggered as much as I was at the start of our transition. At first I ignored those triggers and hoped it was all just temporary while we were preparing our return overseas.
More to come so look for my next mental health vlog!
Trusting the Lord does not always come easy. When a situation we are going through has no clarity for us, when we are confused about our circumstances and when we don’t understand why God has allowed things to happen in our lives, it becomes hard to trust Him in those seasons.
Perhaps some of us have the wisdom to understand what is going on while in the midst of a storm, but oftentimes we lack the greater picture of what is occurring. In those moments and seasons we have to choose to trust the Lord as we navigate the valley.
I have experienced enough of the faithfulness of God in my life where a sure pattern has been established in our relationship. God often gives me understanding and peace of a season I have just walked through or He releases that to me in time. This does not mean all my questions are answered, but for the most part my eyes are shown where the hand of the Lord had been the entire trial.
For myself personally, the last three years have blurred together under an umbrella of intense warfare and trials. I can actually tell you the day this season started for me. There was most assuredly a moment where I knew that the enemy was after me. I only knew those things because I felt it within me and I responded with holding more tightly to the Lord. Three years is a long time to endure an entire valley season, but that season has not been without God’s faithfulness and deep love for myself and my family.
While 2021 was coming to an end, God began to not only show me insight with what I just walked through for three long years, but also a long sought after word that this was the close of that intense season. And He has only confirmed it more since then.
I can only liken this dark season to Joseph in Genesis, who remained in prison two extra years because the chief cupbearer forgot to mention him before the Pharaoh. That betrayal, and no doubt the feelings of isolation and being forgotten by the Lord, taunted his heart. Yet, God had a perfect plan and a perfect time to release His child into promise and purpose.
As God continues to show me what He was doing in me and with our relationship, I am humbled how a lot of what He did was protect and guard me in this season. I did not always feel protected, but He had His hand on me and His angels surrounding me most in those times.
I wanted the Lord to answer my pleas for help and release me in my way, or what I saw as the only way, but He had a better plan and knew what I needed most. I wanted to be delivered out of tough situations. He only sustained me within them and gave me His grace to endure.
I wanted others around me to change and I begged God to change them. And instead the Lord brought change in me. He allowed parts of me that were holding me back from being fully who I am in Him to die, and I felt the pain and grief as His work was accomplishing something beautiful.
God was healing deep wounds in my soul. Wounds I had no idea were there or that were even impacting me on the level that they were. And as each wound healed I was able to look back in my own life’s timeline at those moments where I had allowed such wounding to be the lenses I saw them through.
Pieces of a complex puzzle were coming together and things began to make sense and become clear. I saw my own negative behaviors as a response to those wounds and I was amazed how healing resolved a lot of them.
The past three years, as horrible as they felt and were at times, will forever be marked in my heart and mind as the years that God dared to heal me and rescue me from myself. And instead of answering my desperate plea to be either removed out of a difficult situation or for Him to intervene the way I wanted Him to, God in His deep love for me desired my wholeness and His purpose in me rather than to respond as I asked.
How to lesson anxiety is crucial for those that find themselves more anxious than they need to be…
In this video I will be sharing with you practices I have in my personal life that help me calm my anxiety and retrain my brain to live out of the parasympathetic nervous system more often. We may not be able to stop struggles with anxiety all at once, but we can learn to continue to live our lives abundantly despite our issue with it.
The brain can learn to be on alert at all times because of certain stressful environments and experiences, but being on alert this much is not good for our mental or physical health. Learning how to practice calmness and other anxiety coping tips can be key in helping our brains learn that we are safe.
Do you find yourself questioning your abilities before God?
Moses’ response to the call of God on his life to be an instrument of deliverance of God’s people was first met with reluctance. He told the Lord how he lacked in his speaking skills, revealing a lack of confidence in his abilities to be used. However, was there more going on in his heart that we can try and understand? And do we, because of a lack of confidence in our own abilities, have more deeper reasons of not walking out what God has asked of us?
