31 Days: Does God Transform? {Day 5}

Fear can be crippling.  Fear can bind you like invisible ropes keeping you back from your destiny.  Fear can be visible, seen, and obvious.  Or it can be subtle, unsuspecting, and unforgivingly relentless.

I have to be honest….I had both kinds of fear.  In fact, I had not even known the extent of my fears until I stepped smack dab into the center of revival.

There, so mercifully, God shined His light straight on those dark places inside of me. Exposing what I was and calling forth who He wanted me to be.

Do you have fears today?  Sometimes we have fears, but don’t know it.  Sometimes we possess them, but work exhaustively, to try to hide them.  

While my husband worked late at night, I stayed alone in an old house all night, in the depth of the city.  Words can’t tell you what paralyzing fear I had.  So much so that I could feel it, devouring me while I slept.

Other times I woke in the middle of the night with fear clenching me in its grips.  Keeping me from breathing, pressing tightly against my chest.

Yet, when revival began to ignite in my Spirit, I can’t explain it…all I know is that God touched me and I have forever been changed since. 

There was no shaking or being slain in the Spirit.  There was no “Ah ha” moment.  But yet what I found was all the books I had read and psychoanalysis I had done to “fix” myself, were completely worthless in the moment God’s grace decided to touch me.

Prior I had tried to arrogantly convince myself that if I was smart enough, educated enough, rich enough to get out of the city….somehow the darkness wouldn’t plague me.  

Yet strangely enough, it wasn’t anything I had done or could do to deliver myself from my past, these nightmares, and the fears that continually strangled me.

No matter how we try, no matter how we fool ourselves…we can never be our own Savior.  Only Jesus can do that.

In a second God can do what a man can spent a lifetime working on. 

And often times He will let us struggle, let us keep striving and straining, and laboring, and working hard.  He will let us use every effort of diligence…to somehow try to heal ourselves….

Until we are all out of strength, all out of breathe, all out of any kind of hope in and of ourselves.  

And that’s when…when the wrestling stops…that God most often shows up, to do what no man (or woman) can do for themselves.  That’s most often when the greatest healing of our souls happens.

That’s when God’s love reveals most…He is a miracle working God, a powerful God, a God who loves us and never gives up on us….even when we give up on ourselves.

There was no doubt about it, I experience deliverance….not just simple, little changes in who was….but radical, life changing, forever transformation of the soul and spirit.

In looking back, I am the first one to attest that I had absolutely, without a doubt, nothing to do with it.

It was all God.

Still in this crucifix of my own striving, I died but yet was resurrected.  I not only saw the world different, but I loved people and most of all God more fully, more completely.

Hope rushed through my veins for the first time in the history of my life…not paralyzing fear, doubt, and thoughts of insignificance.

And like a bud blossoming to the warmth of His presence, I began to come to life again…live again…in a way that I had never experienced.

It has been nearly a decade since God touched me.  Still even to this day…I can attest, fear is not part of my identity.  I look back on “my old self” as if it was some stranger. The lies I had believed. All the silly things I wrestled with…seem almost comical…in retrospect.

And yet, at the time, I didn’t even realize that God was doing similar things in all those around me.  In fact, because of the fullness of His presence, the peaceful and such abundant grace we rested in…

I didn’t even recognize that I was in the center of revival…

Or the fact that God wasn’t done with me yet…