#ywam2015

Holy Spirit week was awesome. I was looking forward to it so much! I couldn’t wait for my sisters who had never encountered or experienced the Holy Spirit to have that opportunity. It was amazing to watch. The husband of our speaker gave me a really good prophetic word during ministry time of class one day.

He said, “Right now you’re building steps up to the top of a wall. You are a watchman of the wall-a watchman of the night. God has gifted me with the mandate of intercession. I will be able to see what the enemy is doing and pray against that. He’s always had a good plan for me that won’t leave me dry or disappointed. I will see 10,000 come to Christ. He sees me. He rages for me. He is passionately in love with me. He wants to hold my hand.” That was soooooo encouraging. It confirmed things I’ve heard before, and reminded me of promises God’s given me.

She took some time to talk about envy and my favorite thing she said during that time was, “Any time you fake celebrate envy is present.” Ouch! How many times do we pretend to be happy for people in our lives all while secretly harboring bitterness that we aren’t receiving the same blessing or favor that they are? I want to be real. Really happy for my friends. Really joyful because they’re joyful. I don’t want friendships to be affected by envy in my life!

Week 8 was a great big kick in the butt spiritually. It was all about dying to ourselves and giving God everything.One thing Jeremy talked about a lot was “The moment grace gets boring is the moment you don’t understand it.” How true! We can never ever ever fully understand grace and the magnitude of what it means for us eternally speaking.

“We end up trying to redeem our lives rather than living the redeemed life.” Whoa! That’s crazy. What an amazing perspective shift. We can never redeem our lives. We have been redeemed by the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross. That is the only way redemption was possible, and because of that our focus should be living as who we are in Christ rather than trying to make ourselves seem redeemed enough for Christ.

“If you defend something it’s part of your identity. We defend what makes us who we are.” It’s funny how when we are doing bad things we tend to become super defensive. When we are dating someone everyone thinks we should break up with, we constantly defend their behavior. I want to spend more time defending my faith and relationship with Jesus than the sinful desires of my flesh.

Week 7: Sex & Relationships

I must say this wasn’t a week I was particularly looking forward to. Honestly I’d rather avoid the topic altogether. Luckily we spent a lot of time talking about relationships and a lot less time talking about sex. This week was amazing for me. Our speaker Pat Caven taught us so many little things that were life changing. The biggest thing she taught us was that No is a complete sentence. You don’t have to defend your no. You don’t have to explain your no. No is No! That was revolutionary for me in so many ways. I am allowed to say no and not have to explain myself. Wow! Such a big shift mentally!

Some other amazing things she said were:

“In the transformation from the old to the new, the presence of God is the anesthesia.” Being able to go back and look at that today means so so much to where I’m at now.

“Christian maturity is our ability to access the holy spirit within us.” Wow! That pretty much speaks for itself.

“Children are like wet cement. What you experience gets recorded permanently into the rock.” That statement couldn’t be more true. I think healing is being able to take those rocks to Jesus and allow him to wash over the cement with the healing, living water and make them new.

“When the pain of the consequences is greater than the pain of whatever we’re trying to numb, that’s when change occurs.” Such a harsh but true reality. Sometimes it has to hurt more to numb the hurt than to feel the hurt.

“80% of the relational difficulties we have as adults are based on the first 20 years of our lives.” YEP.

“We fight against the very thing we believe deepest in our hearts.”

“You can deal with the same issue repetitively, but it will shrink in size.” This was so encouraging. I get so frustrated seeming to deal with the same things over and over again. Realizing that’s natural and the problems really are getting smaller made a huge difference.

Week 6 we set out on Sunday morning for Ensenada Mexico. It was a really long drive, but we had a lot of fun on the vans. We arrived at Misiones MUC pretty late and got ready for bed. Monday was a day full of classes and teaching by a guy named Rich who came down with us from the local church we attend here in Vegas. We talked about evangelism. He explained 4 main hindrances to evangelism. 1. Bad experiences/examples, 2. Apathy-passive-not caring and active-too busy to care, 3. Unbelief-choosing not to believe in the power or promises of God and 4. Fear of man. We had some time to ask God for forgiveness in any of those 4 areas. I had to apologize to God for believing that he wouldn’t heal my mom from cancer because he makes me go through everything the hard way. My unbelief in that area was so high and it felt really good to let that go.

Our first outreach was to a safe house for girls that had been trafficked. I got to share a 5 min testimony with the girls there. It was so amazing. I got super disappointed because we had a chance to pray for the girls and I really wanted to be able to pray for someone completely in Spanish. That didn’t happen, but God redeemed that the rest of the week. That night we had a prayer and worship service for our team. Trey lead the service time. He came over to me during the prayer time and gave me a word. He said God was not overlooking me. He notices me and sees me .He said I will see the dead raised to life with my hands. God will give me the nations and I will lead thousands to Christ. It was really encouraging and confirmation of what I’ve heard in the past, but I was extremely frustrated. How can someone prophecy something that incredible over your life and you not have the slightest emotional response? All I wanted was to feel. I was tired of being numb. I talked to my leader about it some and ended up just going to bed trying to forget about it.

We had more classes the next day and then we went to a rehab center for girls. The moment we met the girls, one girl was crying. Her name was Vivian, and she was upset because she had been at the rehab center for 2 weeks and hadn’t seen her daughter the whole time she’d been in there. We worked to clean the rehab center, fold laundry and do some work outside. Before we left, I pulled Vivian aside to talk to her some more. She opened up about her dreams to be a missionary. She told me a pastor had come the week before and told her she would reach nations. The girls she lived with made fun of her for that. That broke my heart. She said she had a copy of the book The Purpose Driven Life in Spanish and read it every night. I tried to encourage her and shared a little bit of what I’d been through. I asked her if I gave her something if she would be allowed to keep it. She said yes. I took off my bracelet that said survivor and put it around her wrist. I told her to never give up and never forget she was a survivor. It was such a powerful moment. Our team led a worship song and prayed over the girls. While we were praying over her she wept and wept. She said she could feel the warmth of the Holy Spirit. She was so touched and encouraged that day. I was so grateful we went there and got to minister to them.

That afternoon we went to an orphanage. We got to do a skit and lead the kids in some songs. I got to teach the kids Jesus Loves Me in Spanish. :) That was SO much fun. We went outside to play with the kids. I was kinda just floating around but ended up talking to this one little girl. She clung to me. She was absolutely hilarious and stayed with me the whole afternoon. We talked in Spanish the entire time. I really enjoyed our time there. That night we had another prayer and worship time for our team. I was trying so hard to be open and expect God to really do something in my life. He gave me some things to pray over 2 of my sisters. I did, but afterwards I just felt extremely frustrated. Suddenly I had an overwhelming desire to die. I wanted to just run into the streets of Mexico and end it all. That was really weird and random because I hadn’t really struggled with thoughts of suicide in months. Leah came over and asked what I was thinking at that moment, and I told her I was trying to think of the sharpest thing I had in my possession that I could cut with. They called everyone up to pray over the people who were hosting us that week. I ran out and went to my room. I was so upset. I felt completely out of control. I was actually afraid of myself in those moments. They started a bonfire. I ran downstairs and found Leah. I felt like I had a fleeting moment of clarity and I used it to look directly into her eyes and tell her I needed her to help me. I wasn’t ok and I needed help. She sat with me for a bit and told me we would pray with Trey in a little while. I was out of control. I couldn’t focus on anything, I didn’t want to pray.

About an hour later almost everyone was in bed, and we headed upstairs to pray. It turned into a 3 hour deliverance session in which God set me free from SO many things. It was incredible. I was overwhelmed and exhausted, but I knew I was free. My sisters were so happy for me and couldn’t wait to see me live out my freedom. Over the next few days, I realized that I could no longer access my other personalities that had been there my whole life. (Side note: I was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder in 2012. Because of the severe trauma I endured as a child, my mind coped by forming different personalities to handle the things I was enduring. They had been there my whole life and I constantly used that as a way to cope.) It was so weird to not have them there. I knew God had done something amazing, but it took me a few days to wrap my mind around what he’d done. It was so good to have the love and support from my sisters during this time. They were so excited and loving towards me. It really helped solidify my freedom. :)

The next day we went out to migrant camps in the city where most of the workers are labor trafficked. It was hard because they spoke indigenous languages not English or Spanish. It was good to be there and get to show them God’s love though! We made a pit stop at a little school where we had about 7 minutes to minister to the kids. The local pastor led them in the prayer of salvation. It is so rare to get to do that in that location. It was amazing! That night we went to the red light district in Ensenada. It was really weird! It was super heavy and dark. It was extremely depressing and sad.  There weren’t a lot of people out on the streets at all. Even the music blaring from the bars had an extremely depressing undertone. We prayer walked for about an hour and then we left. It was good preparation for the red light district in Tijuana the next day.

Week 5 was a struggle for me. I have a hard time really caring about plate tectonics, or dinosaurs, or giants, or all the controversial science topics out there. I was really uninterested in the topic. The speaker did a good job presenting the information, I just really couldn’t connect with it. It was really weird because the enemy was really using tiny, random things the speaker would do to trigger things from my past. I didn’t want to see him or be around him. After talking to my leaders, however, I realized it really had nothing to do with him and everything to do with what was being triggered. That was hard to accept because it was much easier to put the blame on him and try to avoid it that way. 

We had an amazing speaker that week for our track focus. She came and told her testimony of her daughter who had been trafficked. It was so overwhelming and my heart just broke for that situation. The worst part was that the daughter wasn’t completely out of the trafficking industry. We all prayed for that speaker and her daughter’s situation. We went out onto a street called Tropicana where the speaker had said her daughter frequently used to be forced to prostitute. We did a prayer walk and tried to speak to anyone we saw on the street.