My God is All Things to Me ~

He sees me
He doesn't blame me
I am worthy of the best Husband
He desires and takes great pride in being my husband
He does not endure me
I will not be left / He will not check out
I AM worth the trouble
He desires to mold me, lead me, grow me and all the
while loving me ~ walking proudly beside me,
showing me off as His ~
He defends me!
He sees ME and thinks I Am Everything
I am cherished
I am precious
I am strong ~ He is not intimidated
He is stronger yet He is soft~ He teaches me
He sees Me!

Forgiven

I wrote a story in this blog August 2008 and I called it The Little Girl Inside. The story was a brief summary of my life dramatically featuring the death of the child in me the moment I was violated. At the end of the story I used the power of my pen to write the word forgiven across my abusers name, thus bringing that little girl back to life. When I wrote that I was standing on faith that one day I was going to be able to truly forgive this man that had ripped my soul in two.

My faith statement became a reality 2 months later.

Do you know how God did it? One morning in October was having my quiet time, praying and talking to God when my grandson came running into the room, upon seeing me with my eyes closed he apologized and ran out of the room. I smiled. In that instant God spoke a soft gentle word into my heart. He said "that was Tony once" an innocent child who was hurt and in his pain he hurt you. Next thing I knew I was on the floor sobbing heavily for the loss of that innocent little boy. I forgave him from the deepest chambers of my heart that morning and I began to see life through her innocent eyes again.

This June 2010 The Lord impressed on me that it was time to forgive him face to face so I went to his home and forgave him face to face, just like God asked me to. It was nothing short of a miracle. I felt no shame, no anger, no bitterness. God removed it all. Every last drop of anything evil God took, removed it from the root. As I sat across from him I stared down at my hands they were steady as a rock. I remember when simply talking about this man made my hands shake and my stomach turn into knots. And here I was sitting across from him with compassion flowing out of me for him and the pain he has carried in his life. I told him it was time for him to forgive himself and that God loves him. I assured him that God himself sent me to him because He wanted him to seek him with his whole heart and to lay down the past and step into the life God has for him.

I saw his pain as tears flowed down his face. I prayed with him and for him and left. Totally awed at my God! What an amazing God we serve!

The more I read his word, the more free I become. Staying obedient has brought so much of his very presence into my life. I never imagined my life could be what it is today. My eyes have not seen, my hears have not heard, my heart can not conceive the things that God has prepared for me. (1 Corinthians 2:9). He is not kidding. But more importantly, God is not a respecter of person, what He is doing for me He will do for you!

Praise God!

What is Restoration House?

I started this blog during my recovery. My recovery from a broken heart and a shattered spirit. At the end of my recovery a home for broken women was birthed. A friend of mine emailed me yesterday and suggested that I blog about the home and tell some of the stories of the girls that have come through here. Not sure why I hadn't already been doing that. Time probably, but it is time well served to share the miracles that take place here. Have all the girls experienced the transformation that I have, the freedom from pain and past hurts? Sadly no. But those that willingly surrendered control of their lives to God certainly have and that is what these blogs are going to be about. I hope one or some touch your heart and start you on a path to complete restoration!

Restoration House started as a desire to help women get off drugs and alcohol. This desire has turned into a mission to minister the love of Christ to these women. After seeing and experiencing the transforming reality of what surrendering your life to Christ can do, it has become my life's passion to open homes in small communities for young female adults with a deep desire to overcome addictions and alcoholism. This home will also be a safe place for young pregnant mothers with nowhere to turn. We offer an alternative to abortion and an alternative to a life of drugs and alcohol. At Restoration House we don't focus on the addictions and failures these young women bring with them; instead we focus on Jesus Christ-Our Healer and Deliverer.

For Brian

A man fell into the sea. He was a powerful man, not just in status but also in statute. He had great muscle strength. The people on the boat threw him a life saver. This floating device was designed to save lives. The man full of pride believed he could save himself and began to swim towards the boat. The man in all of his strength fought hard but the undercurrent was much stronger and continued to carry him further out to sea. He eventually gave up and the sea overtook him, carrying him to his death. The floating device bobbing up and down was untouched. The floating device was designed to save lives. It worked, it was good, yet he died.

Another man fell into the sea, in his fear he grasped for the floating device. People began to pull him in, but he continued to flair his arms wildly and kicking his feet frantically. People shouted at him to be still and to hold on tightly to the device but he wouldn’t listen. As the waves got higher and the wind began to blow, his kicking made it difficult to pull him in. He was tossed to and fro and due to his arms flailing about, he was thrown from the floating device and carried out to sea to his death.

You watched in horror but you did not see the one man’s failure to reach out to a device that was designed to save his life. Nor did you see the other mans failure to hold on tightly to the device so he could be pulled out of the raging sea. Through your eyes you saw a device that didn’t save their lives. Through your eyes you saw what you were told was a life saving device that didn't work. You didn’t trust this so-called life saver, so when you found yourself in the middle of the raging sea, waves overtaking you, you didn’t even bother reaching for the floating device that was just inches within your grasp, you laid your arms over your chest, closed your eyes and let the sea shallow you up.

The floating device was designed to save lives, it works, it does exactly what it was designed to do, but you have to reach for it, grab it, wrap your arms around it and hold on to it with every bit of strength you have inside of you. As the waves cover you and the undercurrent pulls you down, your grasp on the life saver will get you to safety. It is guaranteed to do that IF you just hold on.

Jesus was designed to save lives. That is the reason he was born. Those that refuse to grab a hold of him because of pride do so by choice, it is not HIS fault. Those that grab on, but let go and continue to do things their own way and fall back into the raging sea, do so by choice, it is not HIS fault. The life saver is not defective because it was not used for the purpose it was designed. Neither is Jesus defective nor is His blood and sacrifice rendered ineffective for you because someone else did not apply His blood, His word and His promises to their lives. Jesus loves YOU! He died so YOU could be free! He can bring you safely out of the raging sea and put your feet on solid ground. He can do that, IF you reach out grab a hold and don’t let go.

I love you Brian.

The Miracle of Transformation

Well its been a while since I have posted here. Not for the lack of having something to report, actually on the contrary, there is too much to say and time has been a precious commodity these days.

I began a quest to draw near to God and for God to draw near to me, in this quest I have found a tangible God that cares deeply for me and shows himself to me daily. In this quest I have had many encounters with the presence of God himself and in these moments I am forever changed. The transformation that is taking place in my heart is not always a pleasant thing. Actually it very seldom is pleasant but the bittersweet aroma that I am left with is everlasting and carries me through until my next encounter with Him.

I wonder if a butterfly experiences pain when it is transforming from an ugly caterpillar into its final stage as a beautiful butterfly?

No one sees what goes on in private, hidden in that hard shell of a cocoon that encases and protects it until it is ready to submerge from its safe hiding place to reveal to the world the miracle of transformation.

I wonder if it complains because it is bound and unable to see the world, I wonder if it becomes impatient with the process and hinders its change in any way? I think not. I believe this creature submits to the power that is within it, and allows the change to take place naturally so it can submerge from its captive state as a worm crawling on the ground to a beautiful butterfly whose wings take it to the greatest heights on this planet and soars letting the wind take it where it may.

Granted this change is short lived but what would we pay to experience such a transformation in our own lives even if the glory only lasted for a short while? Our days as it is, are numbered and no one knows their number so it goes without saying that to spend those final days transformed and soaring to the greatest heights and letting the wind (Holy Spirit) take us where it may is a glorious thought.

Is it possible for us or is this transformation only available for a creature that appears to have very little significance? If it were possible what would we pay?

It IS possible and the price has already been paid. By whom? Our creator! Our Father in Heaven. He has prepared like that butterfly a change for us, a transformation to pick us up from the ground and deliver us from the bondage of sin and set us free so we can spread our wings and let the beauty of who we were created to be shine out of us so we can bring a sweet aroma to the world around us. All we have to do, like that butterfly is to submit to the power of the Holy Spirit that draws us near to his son Jesus, stop struggling and let the transformation take hold of our hearts and our minds.

What a glorious transformation and it is available for you.

My Testimony

Revelations 12:11 We overcome Satan because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of our testimony....

I am sorry to say that my life is not very unique. I say Sorry because it is a shame how many women suffered at the hands of a family member or so called family friend.
When I was a little girl I thought what had happened to me was so vile, and so shameful that I must be the only one in the whole world that must be going through it. Little did I know that I probably was sitting next someone in school just like me.

My step father began to molest me when I was 5. The guilt and the shame I felt, was the manipulation tool that he was able to use to keep me quiet. I finally told my mother at the age of 9, thinking my nightmare was over. Wrong. My mother stayed. Telling however did empower something inside of me and I no longer allowed him to do those things to me. I became very brazen and tough mouthed. He began to knock me around and the peculiar thing about that is that it almost made me feel better. Which I later learned was part of the need to self inflicting outer pain to numb the inner pain and to help subdue the guilt.

He also began to hit my mother which was something he hadn’t done before. I felt so guilty about that I would come out of my room and purposely antagonize him, he would leave her where she fell and turn on me. My mother would then get up and hurry to her room, locking her door behind her. He would hit me a few times then go away.
Probably the most painful thing I experienced was watching my mother at the kitchen table with her address book in hand calling everyone she knew from our church and elsewhere to see if I could come and stay with them. You see it was either me or him and she chose him. I was the “problem”. I didn’t realize how much that truly hurt my heart until I had my own daughter.

My real father was a cheater and an abuser. The only man that I trusted and that had been good to me was my grandfather and he died when I was 9, which threw me into a major breakdown that required I be medicated.

I began to drink when I was 15 and I drank nearly every day as a teenager and tried a few drugs but drinking was by far my favorite choice o f drug. I also loved working. As I grew older I had more of a problem with being a workaholic then a drinking “aholic.”

At the age of 16 I took a bunch of pills and ended up in the physic ward at citizens. Angry and bitter I really laid it on thick, and had my mother removed on more than one occasion from my room.

As I got older my drinking was more sporadic as opposed to daily or even just on the weekends. I could go years without drinking and then decide one day I wanted to party and would turn my life upside down, that was usually when my life was going pretty good. I became really good at self sabotaging myself.

My first love was with an addict/alcoholic. Found out I was pregnant at 17 after leaving him, I mean got on a plane and left him. I couldn’t leave him any other way. After some really disappointing let downs from him, his family and my mother of course (that shouldn’t have been a surprise for me then but it was.) I decided to have an abortion. I painfully regretted that decision, until I finally gave it to God when I was 30.

When life was chaotic I was strong and took charge of the situation but when life was good I was a wreck and mostly clinically depressed. My battle with depression began after I had my daughter. I was 20 years old. I would spend the next 20 years fluctuating from severally depressed to moderately depressed, but nevertheless depressed. Not a day went by without the sense of dread and sadness looming over me.

I married at 19 to a pretty nice guy, wasn’t much of a drinker and definitely no drugs. His issues came from a dominating father figure so he was very passive aggressive and I of course was aggressive / aggressive. Something I never realized until recently was that he was probably my bumper pad. Our marriage wasn’t bad but at every turn it was strained and pulled. Through the years he dealt with my partying binges, working constantly, moving from house to house. I couldn’t be still. When life got still I got moving. I was always mad about something. I put him down constantly. I probably even blamed him for my bad hair days. Now don’t get me wrong he wasn’t perfect. He had his issues.

I ran the house, the bills, the business, the raising and disciplining of our children. I was a major control freak, and walked and talked work. Nobody could do anything right.
I gave my heart to Christ when I was 30. I was healed instantly from depression and began my journey of forgiveness. My mother was the first one.

We hit church pretty hard at first but then life happened and I was the one they talk about in Matthew 13. I wasn’t rooted in the word and as soon as thorns appeared the word was choked right out and life as I knew it before began only worse this time. My depression came back with a vengeance. Satan was determined to kill me this time.

Our daughters started to get involved with drugs and alcohol when I was at the pinnacle of my business career and on the verge of franchising my company. My husband checked out. He had quit his job and spent most of his days playing on the internet bogged down in his own obsessions. And I could care less.

I was tired. I decided it was time to party. And on my 36th birthday I did just that. A month later left my husband and the girls.

4months after leaving him I met a guy. Cute, funny and he seemed really strong, a leader. He was totally opposite from my soon to be ex-husband. Boy that was the understatement of the century to say the least but I was also very wrong about his character. He was strong but not in a nice way and he could be really mean. He was the mirrored image of me in male form only worse. And if that were not enough he was a raging alcoholic and a closet drug addict.
Before I met him I hated women who stayed in abusive relationships. Remember my mother had stayed. I looked down on them and thought them to be weak. A year and ½ into this relationship, I finally understood the obsession. I had lost so much weight I barely crested 95 lbs. My 250,000 year business barely grossed 20,000. I had stopped talking to all of my friends and rarely spent any time away from this man. We fought fiercely. Remember I was the verbally abusive one in my marriage so this guy had met his match. We beat each other up verbally and even physically at times. I was more aggressive in that area then him but he was the master of manipulation. Even at my worst I was always an honest person, so he used that against me while he lied, schemed and deceived in almost every area of his life. His drug use finally came to light and then so did my youngest daughters. So I was learning and dealing with the both of them almost at the same time. My oldest daughter married an addict and thus my life had sowed its rewards. I and my daughters were in hell and I didn’t know how to get us out.

But God……

In Ephesians 2:Verses 1-3 Paul writes how God found us. Messed up and beat up, then in verse 4 he writes “ But God so rich is he in his mercy! Because of and to satisfy the great, wonderful and intense love with which he loves us, that even when were dead by our shortcomings and trespasses, he made us alive together in union with Christ.

When I cried out to him 3 years ago and spent a week fasting, he began to move in my life in such a mighty way. He moved heaven and earth to get me back to Victoria (a place I had vowed I would never return to. I grew up there and would literally get ill when I came to visit) He was bringing me to this very church and even though I was still living in sin he began to convict me and move me towards him. As I began to slowly obey and to start the process of surrendering my will to him, he began to fix everything in my life that was broken.

This is just a small list of what Jesus has done for me in the last two years:

15 years ago my real father gave his heart to Jesus and spent the last 15 years getting to know me and his other children. I was able to be at my father’s bed side when he died in April 08, which was a blessing to be able to care for him the week before he died. God healed a lot of wounds during this time. Just a few months before that God and I took a journey back through my childhood while taking a writing class. God used this class and my writing to bring back to life the little girl that had been stolen from me. He completely restored me. e He After burying my father God gently told me it was time to forgive my step-father and for the first time I was able to sincerely and truly forgive him.

My youngest daughter who I can now say is a recovered addict survived a drug overdose, spent some time in jail and in a rehab and is now living on her own and has a wonderful job. She is watching me, her sister, and her father who has also given his heart to Jesus and each day she is drawing closer to God. My oldest daughter is no longer with her husband and is a sophomore in college on her way to pre-medical school to study medicine. She loves God and is committed to a life of service to him. Neither of my girls graduated from high school and look at them now. I have a wonderful Grandson who loves God. My ex-husband and I are very good friends today by allowing God to show us each of our parts in the destruction of our marriage. and the ex-boyfriend? He is still struggling But God…there is that statement again. God has a done a beautiful thing. I have forgiven him for all he did to me and asked him to forgive me for all that I did to hurt him. God has allowed me to see his brokenness in a way that has allowed me to show him Jesus. He hasn’t used drugs in a little over a year now, although he still struggles with his drinking. I continue to pray for him and I know that God is going to restore him just like he has restored me.

I am now actively involved in helping other women find freedom in Jesus, through 3 venues. One is by opening my own home to women who are ready to transform their lives, Two is here at Celebrate Recovery and 3 through being one of the counselors at our church.

I know personally the transforming power of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is my passionate desire to see the broken hearted healed and the addicted freed. I know it is possible. I am a living, breathing example and have seen Jesus break bonds of those I love and know personally.

Don’t give up on God…He will never give up on you.

A Dream In All Of Us

There is a hope and there is a dream in every one of us. You can’t deny that fact. I don’t care how many bad things you have done, you have a dream inside of you. When you were a child you didn’t dream of drinking yourself stupid or shooting drugs up your arm, spending your nights in jail, molesting a child or killing someone, but that may be your life right now. You may have started out in a bad situation and therefore dreaming of anything more than a peaceful night’s sleep without being molested by a grown-up maybe even your dad, or being run down or knocked around was about as wild as your dreams got. But I promise you fear to dream doesn’t mean that there are not dreams inside of you. God put dreams, desires and hopes in all of us. It is Gods intimate desire to see those dreams come alive inside of you. God has a plan to cultivate those dreams and watch them become reality in your life. How does he plan on doing this? It really will become the simplest thing you have done yet. Surrender your life to him. It may sound hard, and I have to admit the first step is hard but even as hard as it may be; it isn’t harder than enduring the life you may be living right now. All the pain you cause yourself, all the pain you cause others and all the pain that has been inflicted by others onto you, can be forgiven and can be healed. Complete restoration, mind, body, and spirit that IS why Jesus went to the cross. That is why Jesus suffered the torture that led to his death, so you could not only live an eternal life in heaven but so you can live a free life on earth. A life Free from addictions, free from resentment, bitterness, pain, hatred, sick obsessions and negative thought patterns. Is that hard for you to believe?

It seemed impossible for me to even imagine forgiving my step-father for molesting me, for knocking me around and calling me every degrading name in the book. For completely stealing my childhood and unfortunately since I couldn’t let go of my past, stealing the next 30 years of my life. I blamed him for every bad choice I made, for every moment of depression and for every failed relationship.

When I finally let go and asked Jesus into my heart and surrendered my life to God, I asked him to take control and lead me into the plans that he had for me. He forgave me of my sins and began to heal my pain. As I learned and began to study his word and spend time in prayer, he opened up my heart to receive his love, and began to show me how beautiful and lovely I am to him. He poured the very love that Jesus took with him to the cross into me. Which was a four-fold benefit, One to show me how valued I am as a person and as a child of God and Two; to allow me to forgive those that hurt me, including my stepfather, Three; to seek out those I had hurt so I could ask for their forgiveness and Four to pour the love he poured into me out to others that are still hurting. Show them Jesus he told me. Is that hard? Sometimes, in my own capacity to love and in my own strength, but I constantly ask God for his love and his strength and he is faithful to give it to me. He is Real, He is mighty and he is ready, willing and able to comfort you, strengthen you, equip you, and enable you, to achieve your dreams, all for his glory.

He is fulfilling dreams inside of me that had always been there but seemed impossible for me to achieve and I am witnessing him raise up dreams in other’s that have spent their entire life addicted to drugs but are now free because they made a decision to do what I did. Surrender their life over to the one who died so they could live.

Do something different. Ask Jesus to come into your heart, ask him to forgive you, and then thank him because it is done! Then go look for a church. If you struggle with addictions or past hurts of any kind go to http://www.celebraterecovery.com/ and look for a celebrate recovery group in your area.