Dear Friends,
Looking back over the decades and realizing the truth of God’s choice in my birth, my particular family, the place for this particular moment, and my experiences has brought me here today to you, my family in Christ.
Living Waters was and is for me, one portal (of many) that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit used and continue to use in this journey with me. Looking back to when I started, I was searching and hadn’t found a safe place. A place that I could be free to explore my past and explore the realization that life wasn’t working as hoped for. It gave me a place to examine my past, in decisions, in agreements I made, and why I still felt lost and confused, due to what I had been told, believed, and saw in myself and others. This was my yes to Him: to be willing to look back in order to go forward.
Today, I can look back on a granular level and see what was going on in each stage of life. I see more clearly my teens, my twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. And now early in my sixties, my life is clearer in direction, in peace, in who I am becoming in my identity, and in who He is with me. Each stage, as I think of it, had a specific lesson for me to learn, and most of the time, I chose to learn the hard way. Take relationships, for example. My thoughts were, “What can I get? How will others look at me with them? How do I get my needs met?” And so many other lies I listened to. These lies were obviously very self-centered, ego driven, and had a level of narcissism mixed in with stubbornness. As I looked back at them, I found patterns or beliefs that needed attention and would take effort to explore deeper.
Willingness and effort is what I needed to bring to the table with God, along with many more journeys He wanted to explain and reveal what would, in His timing, continue to heal so He could remove my false self and replace it with something better.
Living Waters with the Holy Spirit allows us all—in His timing and through our submission—to enter His presence, grace, love, and healing on His terms. I cannot take any credit for the journeys, mountains, and valleys. Looking back, the valleys were the most profitable in my spirit and soul. And recently, the valleys became evidence of what He has done. Valleys of abandonment, betrayal, and decisions based on self, have blossomed to what started out with the thought of my identity in Christ, grew into identification with Christ, and then to being identical to Christ. It was the true beginning of a blossom of who I am, in Him.
The Living Waters family here became an outpost, first of safety. Then, a place of truth that I didn’t know and was hard to look at and receive. Eventually, it became a place of common bond that I knew Christ was and is today. This bond now leads into what I mentioned in the beginning, a new and very real and welcoming place to move forward.
Over the next few months, I see that He has me writing on the journey: my story, my surrender, my submission, and my forgiveness of others and self that has removed the thorns and toxic soil and set me apart from that past. Years of living with a rear-view mirror as big as the windshield have been transformed. Transformed by the Spirit, prayer, reading, attending a Spirit-filled and word-based church, and fellowship with others that may not have the exact same struggle or symptoms but definitely the same roots of hurt and abandonment.
My looking back is now moving me forward with Him, as I follow His lead.
Because of my no, and then a “well, I am open,” yes to Him, in His timing, I am moving forward. His “no,” is really a “yes,” but in His perfect way, pruning us to be fruitful. His “no,” is really a “yes” to draw us close to listen with intimacy. His “no,” to spare us, is really His “yes” to enjoy, help, and encourage us to keep going and trust in Him.
I pray your “no,” becomes eventually, “yes, I’m open,” and flourishes in His “yes.” A new adventure begins. Let us move forward into it together.
