My testimony

I've been a believer in Jesus since I was a little girl. I was blessed to grow up in a family that had Christian values and knew that there is right and wrong and a God that has a plan for each person on the planet. My church family also presented the Gospel to each person who entered the doors of the little white building that salvation is a gift from God though the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and not something that can be earned nor can we ever be good enough to merit heaven.

Grace was taught every week in that little white building but for some reason I felt I still had to earn God's love and work to make Him pleased with me. I knew the Bible said that he loved the whole world and He gave his only Son to die so that anyone who believed in Him would live eternally. So I looked forward to heaven and thanked God that I would not go to hell like an unbeliever.

So growing up I had an understanding that God so loved the world but I was never good enough to feel like the Father God even glanced my way.
One could sum up my childhood and adolescence as daily existing but not feeling like life was not really worth living. I felt dead inside but if you questioned me I could tell you about my conversion experience as a little girl and knew the truth that I was born-again and going to heaven when I died someday.

God opened a door for me to go to college on a four-year full scholarship to CMU as a vocal music major. Moving away from my childhood home and comfort zone forced me to cry out to God to help me. I had a Bible but rarely read it. I prayed but found that pretty empty too. I was convinced God would never speak to me. I felt my life was a big bag of nothing.

I worked hard in school but I started having more and more frequent panic attacks. By December my freshman year, I feared that I would have to drop out of school. Panic seemed to grip me out of nowhere and a feeling of dread came over me every morning when I awoke.

I started attending Campus Crusade for Christ and during Christmas break I went to Chicago to attend a conference. Now I had never heard of Bill Bright before but I will tell you that he spoke directly to my heart. He had me convinced that God wanted to have a personal relationship with Him not so I could just be saved from hell but so I could live a life for Him right here and now. I recommitted my life to God and vowed to seek after Him all my life.

The summer after my freshman year was the most incredible summer of growth in God. I discovered in a deep meaningful way that God wanted a personal relationship with me --ME! I fell in love with the Savior and immersed myself in His Word. I discovered that He wanted to not only save me from my sins but wanted to flood my spirit with His Holy Spirit. I prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit and sang songs of joy and praise that I never knew possible. I read the whole bible from cover to cover that summer. I had a great core group of friends and we all encouraged one another with singing praise and digging deeper in the Word.

Now most would say this was a happy ending and for the most part it was. From this point on, I have never doubted that God has loved me and wanted a personal daily relationship with me as His child. But there must have been some root issues that I could not seem to overcome.

As my college years progressed and I reached my early twenties, I continued reading the Word and praying. Praise and worship was a daily routine and I learned a great deal about spiritual warfare but I could not seem to overcome fear. I had panic attacks and fear gripped my heart to the point that I weekly thought I would have to quit college. I did end up forfeiting my music scholarship because I would just look at the building and felt like I would suffocate.

I floundered the next few years academically but grew as a child of God. I enjoyed attending two churches and several Bible study groups. I eventually made the Potter's House my church family. I loved the freedom in worship and the constant encouragement to seek the Father's heart.

I met my husband at the Potter’s House. I thought it was funny that we attended the same small church for two years before we met. I only attended the evening service and he only attended the morning service. We started dating in July ‘90 and were married that same year. I have never doubted that marrying Alan was God's perfect choice for me.

With as much faithfulness as I could, I attempted to walk out the Christian life. I continued in His Word, prayed and praised and experienced seasons of victory and joy but the panic and depression just got worse. In the middle of my trial with fear and depression, I broke my shoulder and went three years before a doctor was able to determine a treatment.

Physical and emotional pain caused me to feel abandoned by God and only after our first daughter was born I sought help from our family physician about the symptoms I experienced. He diagnosed me with postpartum depression and prescribed medication but I stopped taking it because of side effects. I was too ashamed to talk to my doctor or reach out to those in my church. I hoped more prayer and reading God's word would make me well.

Second baby girl comes along and I can barely function this time. I rarely left my house without severe panic attacks. I wanted to sleep all the time and just speaking seems like a difficult task. I again sought out the doctor's help and medication stabilized me so I could function but this time I felt trapped in a life of fear and depression. At this point I saw myself doing everything a Christian knows how to do but still I was failing. I felt defeated and even reading my Bible became a huge mountain in my life.

I believed at this point I was some type of second-class Christian and although I would end up in heaven, God would not be able to use me for more than just the occasional good deed. I hoped someday I would stumble on to the magic key written in the Bible that would release me from my shame and give me a purpose here on earth.

Alan did his best to understand what I was going through. He loved me but really did not know what to do for me. I think he started to blame himself for my unhappiness. In my frustration I probably blamed him too. I blamed the devil and knew he had afflicted me with depression and panic issues. I cried out to God to deliver me. I begged the Most High to take away my shame.

For nearly 10 years I lived with so much fear and depression that for seasons I would stop leaving my house. The stress was causing my body pain, I suffered intestinal problems, marital problems and I stopped trying to make friends for fear that they would discover my deep shame.

In the meantime, our pastor was preaching from the pulpit some interesting themes. Grace. I knew what grace was. It is undeserved favor. It is the only way to get saved. God gives us the gift of grace and we are saved from hell and when we die we go to heaven. I knew that. It's simple. But did I?

He kept on preaching. This was not new information but for some reason it became alive for me in my heart. Pastor often told us that he would say to himself into the mirror, "I am the righteousness of God through Christ Jesus" and the first 100 times he did not believe it but said it because he knew he needed to get that truth on the inside of himself. He challenged us to say that we are "blessed and favored of the Most High God".

I didn't feel blessed. I felt ashamed. I felt like I was a disappointment to God and a false witness of the Gospel. My life was the opposite of what I thought a Christian should be. I got to a point now where reading the Word was an obligation because I was further afraid of disappointing my Savior with my lack of faith. I knew He could heal me. I knew He wanted to heal me but I was not healed. So it was my lack of faith. Or was it?

A crisis came in December ‘06. I could not walk straight and found it difficult to write my name. I had an even more difficult time forming a completed sentence. For 5 years medication kept me stable yet daily I experienced symptoms of insomnia or hypersomnia, confusion, extreme mood swings and panic in situations that would seem mild to most people.

When I reached the doctor’s office that December morning it was hard to form a sentence and I feared I was losing my sanity. She wanted to hospitalize me but I managed to convince her I had support from my church family and my husband so a stay in the hospital was unnecessary. She sent me home with a new medication that caused me to sleep all the time and have waking nightmares. The side affects were so unpleasant therefore I had to wean myself off. That winter I rarely left the house while living from one day to the next hoping my brain chemicals would not crash again.

Finally, middle of that winter, I'm stabilized with a medication that does not have unpleasant side effects and I truly for the first time in many years, I start to feel better.

The new medication allows me to be able to read the Bible again and I really did feel so much better. I start to believe this was the answer for me. The confusion lifted and I believed I could be whole and live a victorious Christian life. I really started to convince myself that there is no need for shame and just like anyone who needs medication for any chronic illness there is no need to feel ashamed for needing medication to obtain health. I was satisfied this was God’s answer to my prayers. A few months later God began speaking encouragement to further remedy my wounded, weary soul.

God began the process of teaching me about healthy boundaries in my relationships. I had read The Boundaries Book by Townsend and Cloud. I also read the book 12 "Christian" Beliefs that will Drive you Crazy: False Assumptions. I read these books previously on occasion to make sure I was on track and not letting myself be overrun with those that would ask me to jump through hoops that were not what God intended for my life. But there is one thing I over looked. You cannot change your behavior until you change the way you believe.

Was it possible that I had wrong beliefs about God and about the Bible? I had read the Word from cover to cover over 10 times in 10 years. I started to realize it was not my lack of faith that prevented my healing--it was what I believed. It was my belief that I could do something to get God's Grace. I could not work for salvation but I was working to get God's favor. I could not do anything to get into heaven but I was working to make myself worthy enough to enter the Kingdom of Heaven which by this time I knew was meant for the here and now. I also previously believed that when I messed up God was mad at me and required me to pay for my sins in order to have His favor again in my life. This false assumption was working against me.

In church we heard our pastor preaching nonstop that we needed to know who we are in Christ. The devil doesn’t care if you do good deeds but he does not want you to recognize who you really are as believers. Alan I read Rediscovering the Kingdom by Miles Munroe and realized that we are sons and daughters of the Most High and that means we are favored not because of what we do but who we are in Christ. For months we are edified with the book of Ephesians exhorting us to really understand our position IN CHRIST.

We realized that we are seated with Christ in Heavenly places--right now--not later in Heaven after we died. We needed to be over comers here on earth NOW and not later. We read in the Gospels "Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on earth right NOW as it is in Heaven..." We had our eyes opened to knew that we could not earn sonship we ARE sons of the Most High and with that comes authority in Jesus Name. Reading this book and understanding the principal of Kingdom living was an exciting turning point in our marriage and as individuals.

My Heavenly Father helped me recognize that I had allowed fear of people to rule me. I was not speaking up when I knew that others were trampling my boundaries. I was even trampling over my own boundaries. I examined what I allowed myself to think about myself. If I had a poor opinion of myself then how could I expect others to have a proper and healthy opinion of me?

Not everyone understood I needed to set healthier boundaries and speak only what I saw as God’s will for my life. Some friendships had to be pruned in order for good fruit to be produced in my life. So along with lots of exciting growth came some tears of grief as well.

I started to believe again that God desired for me to be healed of the panic disorder and of depression. God spoke to my heart and told me I was now established in a right understanding of who He was and who I am in Christ. I had established my heart to receive healing. I knew that by His stripes and by the power of Christ I was already healed but now I knew that I was worthy NOT by my works but simply by who I am in Christ. At this time my medications had me stabilized and I really could live that way with the meds but I wanted to give God glory with a total restoration of my mind and body.

With my physician’s approval, spring of ’08 I started the process of weaning myself off from my meds. I had tried this in the past and never made it to day three but this time it was fairly easy. I had a new clarity and a new joy that I had not experienced since I was 19 and was first baptized in the Holy Spirit.

This is my current happy ending. I have been off medication for about a year.(since June '08) I went from having nearly daily panic and depression from a brain chemical imbalance to the extremely rare and momentary attacks of satan in my mind. I can say now that I am delivered from fear and depression and won't allow the enemy to steal my joy or peace ever again. The devil may try to steal my peace and joy but I know now that he does not have that authority over me.

Recently, I've been studying God's Word to discover His perspective on healthy boundaries. After a year of study God gave me Psalms 16 as an outline for understanding that we are hedged in by God's Grace. The path to life is found within a hedge of protection and if we step outside this safety zone God does not punish us but he allows circumstances to make us uncomfortable so we run back to the confines of the Kingdom of God. The circumstances or consequences of our actions are like roaring lions to warn us to dwell in the shadow of the Almighty. I have also discovered that as sons and daughters of God we have to protect our boundaries from people and satan. We must exercise our authority to maintain healthy boundaries. Psalms 16 is just the outline but God's Word is full of examples of being “Hedged in by God's Grace”.

It's my desire to teach this study to others so they can recognize their need to change how they believe about the Father and about themselves. God is good and is in a good mood toward His people and I want to share this Good News!