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How Knowing God Changed Me pt.1
Posted : 13 Apr, 2011 12:18 AM
Well, I am a completely different person from the messed up female I used to be because of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.:glow::applause:
I was born in a very dysfunctional family in the Bahamas where I was physically & sexually abused. My family lived in 3 houses in one yard. My grandmother had 10 children & they all except for one lived there. My mother lived with my daddy & sent me to sleep with my grandmother, I suppose because my dad did not want a daughter but a son. He is a Haitian & he & my mother could not be seen walking down the street together holding hands even though they were married. Bahamians are very hateful towards Haitians. My dad left & went to Miami, Florida when I was around 3 years old. So, my mother had to move back in the house with the rest of the family & she was very depressed. I also inherited this depression from her & was left alone many times when my cousins who were younger than me were taken to parties & movies etc..
My mother abused me physically & emotionally. She would go out to work & not come back home some times. So, many times no one took the time to feed me. I remember rubbing my hand in the dirt & licking it because I was so hungry.:eat: This changed a bit when she got 'saved'. She came home in the daylight with a smile & never smoked another pack of cigarettes again. She used to fill the room with so much smoke until my eyes & lungs burned.
She never found out how to overcome her depression, I think because she kept insisting that she 'needed' her husband to love her to be happy.
You see I learned that I must 'need' God to be happy & He does not like you to 'need' anything more than you need Him, it is an idol.
So anyway, my mother continued to be emotionally unstable & abuse me.
The change I did see caused me to see that God was indeed real & paying attention. I used to sit on the porch & ask Him questions. I asked Him mainly if He cared about us down here & why did He not do anything when people hurt us. I thought He was as far away as the clouds & did not want to be bothered by us. That is the message I got all the time from my family, that I was a burden, a nuisance.
Now I always devoured the bible as a kid. In Miami I was behind in reading, seeing & writing letters backwards. I prayed for God to help me learn to read so I could read the bible. I would stare at the pages & cry for hours.:prayingf:
In school they put me in a new class that was an extra hour of reading & phonics for kids who were behind, we repeated things until I would feel a cloud filling my head. It was mundane, it was torture. One day I felt a very hot flash & it seemed a light filled my mind. I suddenly looked at the pages in front of me & understood it all. I read every word!
So, they put me from that class in the first grade, to go with a small group to the third grade class for reading. The third graders could not keep up with us. So, I did not repeat the first grade anymore, Praise God.:applause:
During this time of reading the bible as a kid, I saw the wrath of God against sin. I saw the ground open & swallow people. I also saw He picked out people as special to Him. I thought David was who I should be like. I listened to a hillbilly song about Paul being picked by God & I would cry. I also saw that God kept asking for love!!!
He wanted the love of people & David talked of how he loved God. So, how would I love God, He was still a bit out of reach.
Back to the Bahamas I was sent back to my grammy at 13 after my mother married another man who did not want the burden of a kid.
After being filled with the Holy Spirit & a hunger for God & the Word so deep I felt I would die from it. I spent many nights without a minute of sleep reading the bible & praying. I kept praying for revelation of Jesus Christ. Moses asked God for this on the mountain & David seemed to speak often of His Presence, Paul wrote n Ephesians that he prayed for this revelation to fill the church. How else could you love Him unless you knew Him, heard Him, felt Him?
I was again tormented by thoughts of being crazy, asking for knowledge of God was like asking for wings to grow out my back so I could fly. I stayed with my aunt & her new husband for a short while, he gave me a book that belonged to his deceased wife who was a missionary. It was by Arthur Blessit & it was about how he walked with the cross through tangled jungles & across hot deserts with a map or no map, with food & water sometimes but always with pain & bleeding feet. He walked through places where he should have died. In very hard circumstances he spoke of the Presence of God & His peace filling him. How many times did walk on thinking he was taking his last step & someone in the middle of nowhere showed up, fed him, bandaged his feet. This book encouraged me for many of the words of my prayers were written as his experience with a God he felt, he experienced God.:hearts:
When I was filled with the Holy Spirit as a teen I sat & listened to hear the voice of God. I thought if I was finally filled with the Spirit then I should be able to hear God talk to me. It was the cry of my heart all through my childhood, I would ask God to say something, do something.
He did. I would sense things in my heart & speak it aloud. I would understand certain things in the bible & repeat it & ask God is it really you I am hearing?
Then I would go to church after being tormented by thoughts that I was losing my mind. The pastor would get up & repeat exactly what God had just spoken to me either in his message or before it. Sometimes it would be a message given by the Praise & Worship leader.
I was reading one of the gospels - it felt like I was there listening to Jesus speak. He said, "It is given to you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom". Instantly I knew He was speaking to me. I started reading & thanking Him for understanding. I would get up in the night to use the bathroom, read & raise my hands in praise for understanding. This went on for months.
I read Ephesians over & over again night after night. I loved a program that came on TV & just felt I wanted to give something I loved to God, I decided not to watch but read instead. It was not long I was standing with my bible in my hand. I felt a hot flash & light flood my mind. I understood so much of what I had been reading & sat to write notes. It was around 8pm, when I raised my head, it was about 8am.
The pastors were into the charismatic movement & they followed the example in Corinthians, that all were given a chance to speak what God had put on their heart in tongues or to interpret or word of wisdom/knowledge etc.. We also had praise & worship which was different because we expected the Holy Spirit to manifest. The songs were asking God to come & be with us. I practiced singing to God at home about how much I loved Him. I did not feel I loved Him as much as I said I did but I read that Christ was in me, His mind belonged to me, I had a new nature. I read mostly the letters of Paul & it seemed the fulfillment of what God wanted in the Old Testament. I reasoned Jesus said out loud who He was, I felt that it was faith speaking. It was the same with David, he said, I will come into the Presence of God etc.. he spoke by faith.
So I sang & spoke by faith. I began to change. I began to feel I really did love Him.
However, the depression stayed & the suicidal thoughts & I did not understand. I spent a few nights crying & asking God to just change me so I could be free from all the pain I felt all the time.
Finally, I heard, not sensed, the Holy Spirit very loud inside. It felt like a someone banged a gong near my head & the vibrations filled me starting from the center & filled my ears. It was a loud 'No! You have to fight! You have to walk through to victory!':boxing:
My heart broke. He told me & showed me doorways of pain, He called them. I had moved deeper & deeper into bondage as I internalized negative thoughts. As I accepted lies as truth & my mind was distorted by them, I allowed the devil,:devil: who was behind these lies to put me into bondage. So, I had to turn in a new direction & walk out of this whiles facing the same situations.
If no one thought anything of me I must base what I thought of myself on what I knew God thought of me. If not one person loved me, I must not believe anymore that I was not valuable because Jesus showed me my value. Jesus stood in the face of a crowd that was rejecting Him, wanted to kill Him, insulted Him & answered them with the truth. It is because you do not have the love of the Father in you.
He showed me a battlefield & I was on it in Roman armor with a shield & sword. There was such a war, so ferocious that the ground vibrated with the fighting. I looked at almost utter darkness except for a dim light at the far end of the field passed all the twisting figures of men straining against each other. I knew to be free I had to fight through.
He showed me a tree with rotten, sickly roots & rotten fruit. He showed me another tree with healthy strong roots & good fruit. He told me it was not my actions I needed to concentrate on but my thoughts, my heart.
So, I was listening to a radio program called 'Life in the Word' on a Miami station in a little convenient store I kept for my uncle who gave me the book. This was in the 90's.
This lady came on & started talking about the questions she kept asking God, which were the same questions I asked & ended with the same ultimate question, can't You just change me?
She then talked of how God showed her these doorways & called them 'doorways of pain', she saw the two trees, the one with good fruit & the one with bad fruit. She wrote a book called...'Battlefield of the Mind'.
Well, I already wrote a lot so, I will end here by saying, what I thought was a breakthrough was actually barely the first baby step to becoming free from so much bondage. It took years before I felt I was no longer walking around feeling full to bursting with pain, just raw pain inside. Years before I stopped crying for hours & not knowing what I was crying for. Years before I did not feel like dying would be better than being in torment because I was alive.
Well, Praise God now it has been years of freedom!:yay:
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