I am so proud and excited to be a part of the Wholly Loved team, a group of women dedicated to helping other women live in Christ’s freedom.
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Here’s my Jesus story:
I love Jesus. I told someone once that Jesus is truly my best friend, and they just sort of looked at me like, “Okay…”
l’ll tell you right now that one of my favorite things to do is to go to the beach, get up early in the morning, and walk on the edge of the water with Jesus. I am convinced beyond belief I’m going to get to heaven and Jesus and I are going to go for a walk on the beach together. That is my highest goal in life… to really and truly walk on the beach with Jesus.
I grew up in church with an awesome family, and I’m not knocking that. But I think, sometimes, when God has always so obviously been there, that we start to take Him for granted. I went through the motions. I loved him, but I really didn’t love him. And I, of course, wanted things to go my very own way, thankyouverymuch.
I would venture to guess that’s why God pretty much let the devil have at me about a week after I graduated from high school. I can remember sitting in psychology class in my senior year, watching a video about a woman who had agoraphobia and who was terrified of leaving her house. I turned to my friend, and saying, “Geez… what’s so hard? Just walk out the front door!”
Yeah, from experience? It doesn’t work that way. Because that kind of fear is what I dealt with for years. For about four months, I didn’t leave my house without freaking slam out. Even going to the mailbox was an effort. Want to know what that kind of fear is like?
Imagine how you’d feel if a tornado was barreling into your front yard…
Imagine how you’d feel if you were hiding in the closet and the guy with the knife was turning the doorknob…
Imagine how you’d feel if you looked out your windshield and saw the out-of-control semi-truck six feet from your front bumper…
That’s how I felt whenever I thought of stepping out my front door. And nobody understoosd because they were all looking at me and going, “Geez… what’s so hard? Just walk out the front door!”
I did a whole lot of begging God to make me better. He didn’t. Not all the way at that point, anyway. It took meds to get me out the door and into college a semester late. Yet the fear still lurked, never really gone. It was sort of always there in the back of my mind waiting for me, almost like the fear of fear.
Of course, when I hit college I did what the bulk of us do when we hit college; I tried to have a relationship with the world and with Jesus at the same time; and well, let’s just say the world won. It took me ten years to forgive myself for one particular choice. That quest for forgiveness led me to write Going in Circles.
To make a long story short, I graduated from college and got married–and on my 28th birthday (how cool is His timing, huh?) God completely and totally delivered me from fear. He healed me. I don’t mean to make it sound like it was a sudden thing, because it was a process, but that’s what He did. And now I know that I owe Him everything. I was a Christian before, but after that experience, I really came to know Him better, to know Him as Father and Son and Holy Spirit. All that I have came from Him, so I owe it to use it for His glory. That’s what I want to do…