Just one word can shatter a thousand lies

Wow where to begin! Can you believe it's been over a month already? 6 months really is going to go faster than I thought it would. This has been a crazy couple of weeks. We had the GBF (global bridegroom fast) again this month so on Monday and Tuesday I was in the prayer room from 8pm- 6am. I actually got there at 6 so I was in there for 12 straight hours both those days and it was so good. I feel like God really spoke to my heart during that time. We also had an inner healing 2 day seminar on Wednesday and Thursday from 3-10 and it was intense! The first day they focused on mother and father wounds. Each parent plays a different role in how we view God. We learn how to receive love from the mother and we learn who we are from our father. It was really interesting. The lady was talking about mother wounds and how it was the mother's job to nurture us and care for us. So I'm sitting there thinking well my mom never lacked in that so I must be good in that area. Then at the end her husband came up and said now if you’re like me you’re sitting there thinking that you don’t have any mother wounds. Then he proceeds to tell us that God revealed to him that his wound came when he was a baby. He got sick and was taken away from his mother when he was just days old. He said that God revealed to him that it was that day that he learned he could not trust and closed off his heart and was no longer able to receive love. The whole time he’s telling the story tears are just streaming down my face and God goes “that’s what happened to you Amy.” When I was first born I got sick and had to be taken away too. So basically God showed me that I have been incapable of receiving love for 27 years. I knew I had walls up but holy crap! So anyway then they had ministry time and basically you invite God into to all your pain and you cry and then God comes and ministers to your heart. Different people came on the microphone and were just saying different pictures that they felt like they got while they were praying. So someone comes up and says she saw a picture of a vast ocean and there’s this little island with 1 tree and a little girl with a box on it. The little girl is very lonely and I saw her opening the box and inside are a bunch of masks. You are putting on all the different masks but none of them seem to fit. So by this point I’m crying again. (Crying during this is actually a good thing and it wi ll be a common theme during this 6 months so don’t worry) My core leader Wendy comes up and starts praying for me and as soon as she started talking I just lost it. She said God says it’s time to take the masks off. He says you are fearfully and wonderfully made and He loves who He created you to be. He said the thing I beat myself up for the most is the thing that He loves most about me. He loves when I come and just “be” with Him. He said there is a rest in the being. He said I have a mother’s heart and nature and as I rest in who He says I am and just “be” that others find their rest and that’s why people are and will be more drawn to me because they feel like that can just be when they are around me. They don’t feel like they have to be anything than who God made them. She repeated like 5 or 6 times He says just be. Just be. I jokingly asked her if she had been reading my blog but of course she hadn’t. I was weeping the whole time and my legs were shaking like they tend to do when God is doing a work in my heart. So that was just the beginning session and then we did father wounds. It brought up some really interesting information that makes so much sense. The guy said that during the world wars each soldier was given a buddy and they basically watched each other’s backs to keep from dying. So obviously since they were in a life or death situation, they bared their souls and were open and vulnerable and best buds with this other person. Then one of them died and the leader of the army or whatever just threw them together with a new “best buddy.” Well of course he wasn’t going to open up and be transparent with this new guy. Look what happened to the one he bared his soul to. It was too hard and men saw things we were never meant to see so those men closed off their hearts. Then when they came home from war they married like crazy and entered their marriages with hearts closed off to their wives. Then all these closed-hearted men had babies and it was the “baby boom.” Well that was our parents’ generation. So the majority of our parents grew up with a father who was closed off and couldn’t show love and affection toward their wife and children. You can only love as well as you’ve been loved and so obviously our parents loved as well as they could but they came from weak and broken parents too. It’s a vicious cycle. So basically it’s the father’s job to call out our identity, and in their brokenness, they often speak other things over us that are opposite to what God says. And since we are so desperate for daddy’s approval, we take whatever they say and that becomes part of our identity. So that ministry time was good but not very impactful. There was only 1 thing which God revealed and dealt with. I never doubted that my dad loved and adored me. The guy=2 0said that father wounds are more like peeling an onion. You peel a layer and then you cry and then you peel another one and cry and so on. He said that one is more over time and God will begin to speak our true identity over us. He said we tend to view God as we view our earthly father so we have a lot of wrong understandings of who God is because our earthly father is not perfect like our heavenly one. Then at the end of the night they did a time of confession. They talked about how powerful confessing our sin to another person is. They challenged us too. They said we want you to confess that secret sin that you’ve never told anybody or the one that you have confessed before but still feel so much shame over. It was good. We confessed and then received forgiveness and washed our hands and head in water and then they anointed us with oil signifying that we had been washed clean and we were pure. There was such freedom! That night in the prayer room worship took on a whole new meaning. The last song we sang was “it is well with my soul” and we sang it with gusto. Pam I thought of you when I was singing because during one session you prayed something about saying it is well with my soul and meaning it and as I sang it, I meant it and believed it =) Then the next day, Thursday, was true femininity and true masculinity. That may have been the hardest day. They basically talked about our beauty and how it gets distorted and perverted b y man’s sinful nature. The talked about how guys pick up on a woman’s need to hear I love you and you are beautiful and use it to manipulate them to get their needs met. So the ministry time was amazing. First they had all the guys go to the back of the room and get in small groups and confess all the ways that they had disrespected women and when they were done they had to look to the front of the room where the girls were so they could see what effect their disrespect had on us as females. It was so powerful as some girls had been so mistreated they were literally on the floor in the fetal position crying as God dealt with all their pain. Afterward the guys all said they will never look at women the same again. So basically different guys came to the mic and just stood in place of different men in our lives and repented on behalf of how it made us feel. Some stood in place of dads, brothers, uncles, friends, boyfriends, co-workers etc. It was really good and I shook uncontrollably again. I guess that’s just the way God likes to deal with me. I’m learning to just give in to it. Anyway, the best part was at the very end they had us cross our hands over our chest symbolizing all the walls we had put up and all the barriers we have to keep people from hurting our hearts. Then we had to lower them and it symbolized us removing all the walls and laying them at the foot of the cross. It was probably the most painful part of the20whole thing and I shook even more but when it was over I just started to breathe in and out real slow and deep and this overwhelming sense of peace just covered me. Then the afternoon was true masculinity. It was really good in terms of marriage. I feel like God is giving me all this wisdom on how to be a Godly wife and mother and really love my family the way He desires me too. A lot of the talks were based on marriage because broken people can not be in a healthy relationship and they are trying to save us the heartache they all went through. God is so kind to deal with all this now and break the cycle starting with me. He loves me so much!! The guy talked about the verse where it says that a man will leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife. He made a point that it says men and not women because women naturally have that ability of self-sacrifice which is why it is easy for us to submit to our husbands and care for our children. Whereas guys are generally more selfish and out to get their own needs met and therefore when a man enters a marriage he is saying he will die to himself and lay down his life for his wife and children. It was really interesting too because just the other day the director of our internship was asked a question about celibacy vs. marriage and he basically said it’s all in the way a guy is wired. He said for him he could have gone and lived up in the mountains with his Bible and nothing else but God wired him in the way that he becomes more Christ-like by being married because he has to humble himself every time he has to ask his wife to forgive him. God knew he was better with his wife than without her. It was a really interesting way to look at it all. He also brought up the issue of submission. He said as women we cannot submit to our husbands unless we believe and they have shown us that we can trust them. He said men don’t expect your wives to submit to your authority if they do not feel loved and beautiful and safe and accepted by you. The teaching was basically that the majority of men don’t know how to be men or even if they’ve become men because nobody teaches them and initiates them into manhood. Or there’s a false initiation where he feels like he is a man which typically is sexual in nature. He said almost every other culture has some sort of initiation into manhood but we do not. There’s so many boys who grow up without fathers. Whether they are physically not there or they are physically there but emotionally absent. So either men turn to their mothers who can’t really teach them how to be a man and an unhealthy bond forms or they turn to their friends who don’t really know either and just teach them to objectify and manipulate women because that’s all they’ve been taught. Again, it’s a vicious cycle. He said that men were wired to build and make things and God plac ed in them a heart to defend injustice. The biggest issue is that for the most part men are passive and are not the spiritual leaders God calls them to be. There was a lot more and I can go into it later if you want but I didn’t really pay that much attention to the guy part. So their ministry time was good. They basically called them out into their destiny to be Godly fathers and husbands. They called them to walk in strength and authority and lead the women in their lives and defend injustice. Then at the end they took these huge swords and initiated them into manhood and knighted each one to be the mighty warrior that God called him to be. So overall it was really good but I am physically, spiritually, and emotionally drained! On top of that, 3 weeks ago Ashley Prior, (who is my favorite worship leader and is on the nightwatch!) was doing a set on psalm 23 and it’s all about how God is a good shepherd and how His leadership over our life is perfect. So I’m not super happy with the way He’s leading one particular part of my life right now so I’m sitting there with my heart closed and my arms crossed telling God that actually I don’t agree that His leadership is perfect. (It’s ok God likes when you come to him real. He already knows you’re thinking it anyway so you might as well tell Him too) The Lord is so kind! As the set went on, my thought process went to my first boyfriend and what my heart went throug h. (don’t worry all is forgiven and we have worked through things and we are in a really good place now) But at the time I remembered how broken hearted I was and I go well actually I’m kinda happy I didn’t have any boyfriends before him because the only way I know to love is with my whole heart. Which is good for the receiver, but hurts like heck when your whole heart gets broken. So as I’m thinking this, God goes “that was me guarding and protecting your heart. I created you and I know your frame and I know the way you love because you were created to love whole-heartedly. I allowed that relationship because ultimately I knew your broken heart would turn you back to me.” It was like all of a sudden truth just flooded into my heart. All those years I had perceived my lack of a boyfriend as rejection and God said no actually that was me protecting and guarding your heart. All of a sudden I am no longer rejected, but guarded and protected! It really is true that just 1 truth can shatter a thousand lies. He has just continued to speak through the last 2 weeks of Ashley’s set and this week during the fast was really awesome! I may have cried the entire 2 hours. I’m coming into agreement that His leadership is perfect and His banner over me is love, which I have come to understand means that everything He’s done and is doing and will do, is out of love and mercy. He really is a good father! I know this one=2 0was really long but I felt like there was so much knowledge to be gained through all the stuff I learned this week and wanted to share it with you. It took me like 2 hours to type it so I hope you read the whole thing!