My Testimony I sent to IHOP written Fall 2010

Personal journey in Christ: I was raised in a Christian home and grew up going to a Christian school. I was very active in my school and church, learning to volunteer at a young age.  When I graduated from high school I went to a community college to pursue nursing and still stayed active in my church. I volunteered on Saturdays with the neighborhood outreach, went on some mission trips, and learned I really liked to work with kids, babies, and refugees. I have a heart for them and mission work.

While I did all these great things of outreach, mission work, and attending church regularly, I felt like I was going back and forth between God and the world. I wanted to pursue God and what He had for me, but friends and boys were a very big distraction. I volunteered and had a heart to serve God and his people, yet I wanted a tangible relationship. I guess at the time I didn’t see God as something tangible. I struggled for years playing hot and cold until one day God knocked me on my butt and I had to totally become selfless and rely on him. At the time I was in a very hard place and He met me that day in my weakness. It was the tangibleness I had been looking for the whole time, but for some things I felt I was too late. I had lived the way I wanted to and had to deal with the scars I had created for the rest of my life.

 Looking back at everything, I have a lot of regrets, but God is working with me on them. He is showing me that He is refining the fire. He has told me he is going to give me beauty for ashes as I place myself at His throne whole hearted and wait for Him in expectation. I’m at the point where I’m ready for Him and to see what He has for me as I wait in anticipation for Him to reveal it. There are a few scriptures that He showed me recently, and I just had a quickening in my spirit that they are for me right now in my life. They are, Isaiah 43: 18 -19, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the waste land.”   Psalm 143:8, “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.”  Psalm 33: 20-22, “We will wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust his holy name. May your unfailing love rest upon us, O Lord, even as we put our hope in you”.  As I read these scriptures I can’t help to think about my future and see what God has for me. I am finally excited about my life and to see a change. I feel like He is making a way in the desert, but only as I sit and wait for him and trust in Him. When he met me that day I realized I couldn’t do it on my own anymore. I had to yield myself in reckless abandonment to Him. Misty Edwards says how I feel, the best way, in her song Lovesick, “I am lovesick, for my Beloved, my Beloved and my friend”. This is how I feel, I ache with an anticipation to know Him better, to see Him more clearly, and for Him to show me things He has wanted to show me that I have never wanted to see or that I wasn’t ready to see. It feels like that last present under the tree that you don’t want to open, because you don’t realize that it’s for you. I didn’t believe something so good could be for me.