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A lot of us are walking through life with wounds of our soul, our hearts and some of us are even crushed in our spirits as well from so much unbearable wounding. We don’t have to stay in a place of wounding and brokenness, we can be healed and trust the Lord to heal us.

In this video, I will share the simple way of receiving healing for your heart and/or soul wounds. I believe people overcomplicate this process and forget to invite the Lord to be our great healer.

In our video today we are looking at an intentional tactic implemented by the Pharaoh to discourage and distract the Israelites from wanting to leave Egypt with Moses. What we can pull out of this part of the deliverance story is a parallel picture of how the enemy often times will use this same move on us. Watch more to learn how to be aware of when the enemy tries to keep you busy and pulled away from God.

 

Thankfulness Makes You Healthier and Happier

Being grateful is linked to being more of a happy individual.

Dopamine and serotonin, the “happy” hormones, are released in our brains when we voice our thankfulness and when we receive gratitude from others as well.

And there are even studies on couples that reveal that those who were thankful towards one another had long lasting and happy relationships (which applies to long lasting friendships as well).

It has been discovered that gratitude increases positive thinking and helps create new neural connections to the bliss centre of the brain (much like antidepressants are meant to do).

Being grateful repeatedly over time keeps our focus on what is going right in our lives rather than what is wrong.

Don’t you just love it when science catches up with the word of God!

During trying seasons in our lives, choosing to be thankful for what God is faithfully doing helps tremendously with our mindsets. It keeps us from being easily discouraged, helps us maintain a healthy mind and guards us from falling into a pit of despair and hopelessness.

Believe me when I share how I can relate to the difficulty of choosing gratitude when everything around you seems to be in shambles.

Voicing a thankful heart that does not feel fully thankful is hard at first, but over time our hearts begin to feel those emotions of pure gratitude helping us to soar above our storms.

Creating a gratitude journal, sending thank you notes to those that have blessed you, and sharing your thankful heart to the Lord throughout your day will help you establish a healthy habit that impacts you, your life, your walk with the Lord and your relationships.

Being thankful often and having this good healthy thinking habit also helps us become more resilient.

We will be able to bounce back from hardships quicker and possibly stronger because of our choice to be thankful.

Resilience is something the Lord encourages us to have. There are many verses in the Bible that encourage us to persevere, to hold onto faith, and to have courage and strength in Him. And there are also verses that instruct us to be thankful always, remembering God’s faithfulness and love for us.

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”

Colossians 3:16

Be encouraged today to choose to be thankful more consistently, creating a habit of gratitude, and remaining steadfast, joyful and resilient in Him as a result.

In this vlog episode, I share how after just three months living abroad in a new country and culture I had somehow developed more and worse mental health issues. Dissociating in response to everything new was becoming my new normal and I also began cycling through depressive and anxiety episodes quite frequently.

This video might trigger those that struggle with specific mental health disorders and I put a trigger warning at the beginning. This is going to be a two part vlog with this part of my story. There will definitely be more to come so keep an eye out!

 

Here is another Unhealthy Pattern Of Thinking, aka a Cognitive Distortion, called “unreal ideal” we can learn about to help not only improve our mental health but also lead us to be more mature as people and believers in Christ.

I share in this video 6 ways you can guard against comparing yourself with others. Comparison is innate in us, but we have a choice to entertain these thoughts or not. Praying this video lesson blesses you and leads you to more growth!

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!

Today’s Article Referenced:
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-emotional-validation-425336
article by Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD

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 His name,
Amen

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!