A Battle, a Breakthrough, a Celebration

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a lovely holiday season, and are settling into the routines and resolutions of the new year, I know I certainly am.

It’s been a few weeks since the last newsletter, and I have a nice long list of inspiration and ideas that I’m looking forward to sharing with you all, but I decided that today’s email is going to be a glimpse behind the veil of this previous season that I just passed through.

Those of you who are in regular contact with me probably have heard, because I’m not shy about sharing it, but it’s one thing to talk to your close friends about a thing, and another to share it publicly. The long and short of it is that by the grace of God, I’ve finally exited out of a hard and disappointing season of my life. Who knew that the Christian walk is not all sunshine and rainbows! But I praise the Lord that even through the battles and valleys, the impossible has happened (at least, what I thought at those low points was impossible), and I am finally able to look towards the future with not only equanimity—but genuine hope, anticipation, and excitement. Whatever the Lord will choose to bring, I know that one way or another I will rejoice in the Lord.

“So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold.” 1 Peter 1:6-7, NLT

2023 Was a Year of Battle

At the top of 2023 I received a prophetic word from a friend that it would be a year of battle, and then a confirmation word came through that said the same, with some elaboration. I think I was in a good place spiritually last year and so I was ready to face the challenges, and indeed, the words came to pass in a variety of ways.

At the beginning of the year I had weird skin issues, even a health scare that had me at the doctor’s office getting various ultrasounds and bloodwork done. By the grace of God all my tests came back clear, and proved to be a false alarm. God even led me to a specialist that had a simple solution for my skin issues, and within the week all my symptoms began to clear up. If there’s anything I can say about that, it’s that I’m thankful for God’s good gift of health.

I faced spiritual warfare from a variety of different areas of my life, from close friendships of mine to close familial relationships of mine. In many ways I was challenged about my identity, and who I believed I was in Christ, and what he had said to me. I remember there was one specific low point where I couldn’t believe the words I was hearing from someone I loved, but that very same night a friend from Chicago texted me a prophetic word she was compelled to share—God would redeem and erase all the words that had been spoken over me, and indeed he did. I received a sincere apology the very next day.

Then moving on into the second half of the year I was tested in terms of my ministry, from a controversial podcast episode that rocked my church community for a moment, to my role as a woman with leadership responsibilities in the church being challenged by someone I had respected. Those were not fun, though I can say for every situation that I went through, I saw how the Lord’s hand was upon my life in sustaining me, and even coming through in ways that I could not have expected. Issues that seemed huge one week were suddenly diffused in the matter of a day, by the grace of God, and seemingly forgotten about and moved on by the following week. Even as I write this, I am genuinely shaking my head at the goodness of the Lord, and the strong community of support he’s also surrounded me with.

Burned by the Prophetic (or so I thought)

So that brings us to another aspect of 2023, and the one that I ended up going through my deepest valley for. And I will be honest—it was in part due to the prophetic, and in part due to my interpretation and timelines of the prophetic.

This past summer I had the honor of being invited to speak to a group of young girls about singleness. And just an FYI if you want to know the Lord has a sense of humor, I got the text message inviting me to speak as I was simultaneously sitting on the couch of my friend’s home, crying to her about my singleness. Let that settle in for a moment. I remember I burst out laughing as I looked at that message through my tears.

But I dried those tears and was genuinely excited to speak. My message was simple. And in June 2023 I walked in front of those girls and said, “smash the idol of the timeline and of marriage and relationships”. I stole a sermon illustration from a friend and took some clay pots and smashed them with a big hammer in front of the girls. One pot was labeled “the idol of marriage” and the other pot was labeled “the idol of timelines”.

I think by this point we all know where this is going, because the Lord always tests us on what we preach. I think this is in part why James 3:1 says “not many of you should be teachers” because they will be judged with greater strictness, and the Lord will test them to see if they believe the words they speak. My dear reader, I was tested.

And more specifically, I was tested on prophetic words regarding my calling in life and the marriage that God had promised me. These were words that as early as 2018 I began to receive, words that would be confirmed and re-confirmed throughout the following years.

But it was in the Spring of 2022 that I finally began receiving the prophetic words that I was REALLY hoping for (read: marriage!). Don’t get me wrong, I’d been getting words from the mystery prophets in Romania for years at that point (and I have a special distaste for the words “Ai primit o lucrare din Romania”) but these prophetic words came from people and sources I trusted. To add to this, in my own personal prayer time I felt like the Lord spoke to me very clearly several times, only to have it re-confirmed by external sources that had no way of knowing what Holy Spirit was telling me in secret.

Those words began to multiply throughout 2023. I would get confirmations every other month or so, and I began to gather them up in my heart. In June I had a friend tell me she saw me in a wedding dress at the doors of a chapel, three days later I had another friend text me out of the blue that she had dreamt of me getting engaged. A few weeks later a stranger at the park who I was talking to said, “the Lord told me to tell you that you are going to get married.” And I was genuinely excited for those words, and really looking forward to what the Lord would do in my life. I wrote each and every one of them down in my journal, looking forward to the day I could compare and analyze which ones would come to pass, and how.

But as the months crept by and nothing happened, I started to get more and more fidgety, and that’s when I started doing some “prophetic math” as you might call it, speculating that surely something should happen by October or November of that year. And funny enough, as I was telling my sister this on a way to a small prayer, the word of knowledge that came through for me at that prayer was the word “November”, and again, a few weeks later another friend had that same word, “November”. Which means I took that word, and I ran with it.

“D-Day”

Let me take a quick interlude here to reassure you all that I do genuinely believe all prophetic words must be tested, and more than that, even if a prophetic word sounds good and great—it needs to be held loosely. We are fallible prophets (and no, that doesn’t mean you’re a false prophet), who oftentimes can let our own desires and feelings influence our words. But it seemed to me like I was collecting these “breadcrumbs” from the Holy Spirit in ways that could not be replicated, that to my logical and rational mind, could not be fabricated.

So of course it’s natural that anticipation, hope, and faith would build as I kept hearing them, even when I did my best to hold them all loosely.

But then “D-Day” finally came and……..nothing happened.

As the months had crept closer to November I had started to get worried, worried that I might have been duped all along, that I didn’t hear the voice of God right, that I was led on a prophetic goose-chase. In many ways my faith in the prophetic as a whole was severely tested, not to mention the deep crisis that happened because of what I had though God spoke in my heart. Surely if God had spoken to me, then it surely would have come to pass. But it hasn’t come to pass…so maybe that means God never spoke? So that means maybe I never heard him clearly all along? So if I’d been hearing him wrong on something so important, what else have I been hearing him wrong about??

Dear reader, you can see how vicious this cycle was, this internal battle in my mind and my heart. As November came and went, another “D” word settled in…”disappointment”.

More specifically, disappointment in God.

I felt that I had been promised the world, and that instead I was leaving 2023 as empty handed as I had come into it, both in terms of what I was hoping for in marriage, and in ministry. I hate to admit it, but I spent all of November and most of December crying. I always thought David was a bit hyperbolic when he writes, “I am worn out from sobbing. All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears.” (Ps. 6:6-7, NLT). But I discovered storehouses of tears within myself that I didn’t realize existed those months.

And those tears would really manifest themselves in my personal prayer time with God, as I wrestled with him over this war between faith and the cold hard reality of things. It was in November that Hebrews 11:1 really stuck with me. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (ESV). And any time I would see the numbers “111” it would be my personal reminder of that verse.

The daily tears eventually dried up, but I wasn’t getting breakthrough in my personal prayer time…I still couldn’t help but sit and cry whenever I came before the Lord in prayer. I would repent and confess my disappointment, but I wasn’t able to break it over me. And to make matters worse, I felt like I was disappointing the Lord in this too—like I had been thrown out of commission, not being able to properly care for others because I was drowning in my own selfish pity.

Larry Randolph from an interview with the Green Room podcast had a great quote, “the prophetic is always early to the scene of fulfillment. We’ve tried to put the prophetic in a ‘right now’ box and that doesn’t work.”

I will be honest, I feel in 2023 I was tested in the same way Abraham was. God promised us good things, and then he asked us to sacrifice it on the altar, not because we had been disobedient or idolatrous, but because he wanted to test us to see whether we held up the gift higher than the Gift-Giver.

And so I sacrificed my promises for ministry and marriage in full expectation and belief that God would “resurrect the dead” as he resurrected Isaac. Again and again and again.

I was reminded of Joseph, who received promises from God as a child, but wouldn’t see them come to pass until he was 30 years old. He sat and he waited, and he stayed faithful in what God had given him, but he didn’t see the fruit of God’s promises for years.

And I think in the end it was my fleshly timeline that ended up doing me in. I had constructed my own little Tower of Babel—one of numbers and dates that the Lord had never actually given me. Hoping to reach for that promise, only to watch it all crumbling down. As disappointment seeped in, so too did it cloud my hope and faith in Jesus. I live in a world of the “now”, I measure my timelines in increments of seasons and years, how could I not realize that I serve a God who sits above time and rules over it?

There was a sermon by Tim Keller on waiting that has sustained me throughout the years, and rebuked me over those years too.

Here is an annotation of his sermon:

“The patience of Jesus is always a sore trial of our patience…God’s blessing and God’s grace almost never seem to operate with our schedule…If you insist on subjecting your timing on Him, you will never feel loved by Him, and it will be your fault for putting this on yourself and on Him…The delays teach us lessons that are priceless about God.”

And this is truly what I was trying to do, to hurry Jesus along when he had told me over and over that this season of my life was precious to him and that he was taking his time in writing it.

Breakthrough

But praise God breakthrough always comes. It might be slow in coming, it might seem like it’s tarried too long—but breakthrough always comes.

And for me it came on January 11th. 1/11. (See what he did there?)

I went to a local church that was hosting 12 days of prayer, one for each month of the year. They had invited David Wagner, a guy who’s interview I liked on the Green Room podcast to come out, so I decided to go. And it was on the 11th day of prayer, when all prayers prayed in that sanctuary were for the month of “November”, that David looked at all of us on stage and said, “I feel that there is disappointment in this room, specifically disappointment in God himself for what you have not seen from him. Tonight we need to put to death disappointment.”

I cried all of my mascara off.

What I love about the prophetic is that it discloses the secrets of your heart, and then in the fashion of 1 Corinthians 14, it builds you back up, it encourages you, and it consoles you. And in a moment, I felt breakthrough finally come through, and that wound of disappointment was finally closed up, as I repented again and this time knew in my heart of hearts that the disappointment that had hung over me was finally gone.

Celebrate!

And then David looked at me from the stage, “you with the sports coat…err blazer,” and I looked around and pointed at myself and he says, “yes, you!”. And proceeded to prophesy one of the most accurate, life-giving words over me. It’s funny how it was the prophetic that broke me, but it was also the prophetic word of God that bound me back up. David looked at me and reminded me of what God had told me himself—he is my El Roi, the God who sees, just like he saw Hagar in the wilderness. He reminded me of the ministry words God spoke over my life. His word reminded me of Psalm 126, that I had prayed over myself time and time again—”when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream…those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy.”

David continued, “this year is going to be better than Disney, because God’s dreams are going to be fulfilled in you.” Hallelujah.

So I celebrated!

Because funny enough, that was the “word of the year” that God gave me for 2024. It came to me in an envelope at a conference in September, and then through a dream a friend of mine had over Christmas, that I was celebrating my graduation from one grade to the next (how funny is God!), and finally it’s what he spoke to me personally for my new year.

I had resolved to celebrate whether or not my heart was in it. But by the grace of God, there’s no need for me to be steely-eyed and resolved, he’s brought that joy back to me. The faith, hope, and anticipation, however that might end up looking—I will celebrate and praise my good Father.

I let Satan sow seeds of doubt into my mind about how I heard the voice of God, but I had heard him all along. Over and over he’d speak to me, he’d remind me in verses, in songs, in words of encouragement, but I had let disappointment and doubt cloud his still, small voice.

This is my encouragement to you, dear reader. Smash that human timeline of yours, trust in the timelines that God has. Put to death the disappointment in your heart, believe in the promises that he has spoken over your life, and trust that whether or not our real circumstances change—he is good, his word never fails, and he does not disappoint.

I leave you with the final annotations from Keller’s sermon:

“Jesus is the ultimate parent. Who takes you by your hand, who loves you. Why would you hurry someone this powerful? This loving? Who treats you so tenderly.

He lost his Father’s hand on the cross. He became weak for us so that we would know that if he has us by the hand, he will never ever forsake us.

Only through our weakness and through the delays will we learn the lessons we need to. Let us be conformed to his patience that we may be partakers of his resurrection.

Are you trying to hurry Jesus? Take him by the hand.

And let him do what he wants to do.”