Before I left for the mission field at the beginning of the year, someone gave me a word that Costa Rica was going to radically change my life. I am writing this to absolutely confirm that word!
In this blog, I am going to try my best to explain how God used Costa Rica to break down walls and open so many doors for me, but I can guarantee that a conversation with me after my Race will be 100x better.
————————————————————————————— a broken heart
There are some things that the Lord makes blatantly obvious that you just have to do. Deep down, the conviction is so strong that you would feel guilty if you didn’t obey the will of your heart. For me, the day I stepped into Costa Rica, God told me I was going to read the Book of John and I didn’t have a choice. I was not overjoyed when God told me this, but if I know anything about God, He doesn’t work in the same manner we do. And so it began, the radical transformation that started with reading a few short pages of a Word that changes lives.
The Gospel of John is different than the other three gospels because it digs deep and reveals the character of Jesus on a whole new level. The first thing that almost everyone learns about Jesus is the Love he has for us. Not just the everyday love, but the purest essence of the truest love ever. In 1 John chapter 4, it literally says that God is love. I knew this about God, but when I was reading the first few chapters of John I did not see this overwhelming love that I have always been taught about. I wrestled with this for a while, but couldn’t see how Jesus portrayed in John was love. While reading John, our leadership taught three different times on the Father’s love for us, and this left me conflicted on the idea of love
After many conversations with my friends, leadership, and God, I came to a conclusion that was a hard pill to swallow: I didn’t know what love was and I didn’t know how to feel love. I had walled up my heart for reasons I am still trying to figure out today, and as a result, I couldn’t let love in. I went back into my memories and realized that the last time I had felt an overwhelming emotion was at the funeral of Mrs. Durant. Instead of actually processing the good and bad of my life until this point I just tossed it to the side and never let it bother me. No obstacle nor failure was going to get in my way because I blocked the part that made me most human. By doing this, I paid the consequence of actually experiencing the full life that God offers. This was hard. My heart was broken by the isolation I put it through from not letting my relationships in my life ever hurt me or love me. I was Brent, I wasn’t going to fail, I wasn’t going to look broken, and I for sure wasn’t going to let anyone try and tear me down. I traded my heart for an image of myself that made me look the part, but actually was a costume with an expiration date.
After really digging and analyzing this truth about myself, I decided that I wasn’t going to live this life anymore and I was going to open my heart to the perfect love of the Father. I just wanted to feel again. I wanted to be RESTORED back to who I was created to be.
——————————————————————————— Insecurities
When I finished reading John all the way through, God asked me to read the first half of John chapter 15 (If you don’t know what that is, I highly recommend you read it right now) for another month. It was here where I started the process of uprooting the lies and walls that held my heart captive. John 15 talks about us being branches to Jesus and the Father is the Gardner. God prunes us and cares for us and in the end, we bear much fruit being the creation we were meant to be. The only requirement is that we must remain. We must remain in the love of the Father and he will restore us back to truth. But was it remain? Remaining for me was to stop looking for answers and letting God bring them to me. From there, the Lord brought up 5 insecurities that were blocking me from feeling love because my heart was constantly defending against them.
*This next part refers to a vision the Lord gave me in the place I call the garden. The garden will be brought up multiple times in this blog*
Later the same day, the Lord constantly whispered “Take me to your garden” in my ear and I had absolutely no idea what that meant so I decided to pray about it. The moment I asked the Lord what the garden was, he brought me there. The garden is the place where the Holy Spirit dwells in me. So there stood Jesus and I, on a marble white staircase, looking into a jungle-like garden. This is the sacred place where the Lord and I meet.
Jesus and I walked down the staircase and into the garden. He handed me a gun and he held a bag. He told me that it was time to kill my insecurities that were blocking my heart from tearing down its walls. We walked down this path and every so often a large black serpent with red eyes would appear and I would kill it and Jesus would put it in His bag. One after one we killed all the serpents in the garden, therefore freeing my heart from the insecurities, but this was only the beginning of heart transformation.
————————————————————————— Taking my heart back from the world
I began to get frustrated at the Lord because His word says that He loves me and that God is love and even after killing off my insecurities I still couldn’t feel the Father’s love. After praying into my frustration, the Lord hit me with a strong rebuke and asked me “where is your heart?” I believed that Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life but my heart was in the world. Deep down I sought after the impossible expectations of this world. I judged myself to a standard that only brought me death. I lived thinking that if I had this, was this, or could do this that I would be loved. If the world loved me then I would feel again. And that is a lie straight from the enemy himself and it is something I will never believe again. Because of this lie, I believed it was impossible for me to love myself. In John 15, Jesus says one of his greatest commandments is to love yourself as you love others and how am I supposed to love myself if I can’t even accept myself for who I am.
One morning when I was praying, the Lord brought me back to the garden. Jesus and I, once again, walked down the white marble staircase and down the dirt path only to come and find a white marble platform. When we reached the platform He looked at me asked me ‘Do you know your worth?” (This vision is very important to me and I would not do it justice by typing out these words so I am going to abbreviate but ask me about the full story whenever you want) and from there He said, “You are worth more than the sky and worth more than all the trees in the garden, you are incomparable.” C’mon now!!! That was the highlight of my week. The Creator of the Universe told me I am worth infinity. Now that is a reason for me to love myself.
It was at this point where someone highlighted in my life that I was acting as a servant of God rather than a son. The difference between a servant and a son is love. I acted as a servant for the Lord because I knew His truth and wanted to share it with the world and strived so hard just to feel as if God was proud of me when I was just so so wrong. The true identity the Lord gives each and every one of us is sonship and daughtership. A son gets the inheritance of His Father and the inheritance of God is eternal life right now at this moment and forever and ever. Who doesn’t want that! I was striving when God said to remain. And once again, in my attempt to save my own life, God’s way worked way better. And so after a lot of surrendering expectations that I thought were going to bring me life and fighting with the Lord, I traveled further down the path restoring my heart back to what God intended it to be.
After aligning my desires with the desires of Jesus, I then felt the way I supposed to feel: worthy of accepting the perfect love of the perfect Father.
————————————————————————————————— A New Creation.
Even after all of what the Lord and I walked through for 2 months, my heart still wasn’t experiencing the love of the Father or anyone. I continued to pray into this transformation and every time I did the Lord responded back “To Be” or “Just Be” and I had absolutely no idea what that meant and so Lord decided to explain things in a way that only made sense in its fruition. After a series of unrelated visions to the garden that caused a few days worth of utter confusion, the Lord revealed that what I am working through isn’t just restoring my heart back, but actually the preparation of the conception of a new creation. What does that even mean? In 2 Corinthians chapter 5 Paul writes that if Jesus is in us then we are a new creation, our past selves of brokenness are washed away, and behold, we are made new with God as our redeemer. The entire time before this, I was asking for the Father’s love, but instead, the Lord was transforming my heart to receive not just His love but everything He is. He always gives more than what we ask. God asked me “to be” because at this point He just needed time to transform my heart and I needed to stop trying so hard to be my own savior. It was my initial reaction to try and save my broken self out of brokenness when only a perfect being can rescue someone out of brokenness. It is like me trying to bring myself out of the darkness when all I know is the dark.
Once I came to this revelation, God brought me back to the garden. Jesus and I walked down the white marble staircase, down another path, and reached this bronze temple with massive torches on the outside. It was exquisitely designed but gave off a hue of darkness. As I entered the temple it was clear something was not right. On both sides of the temple, there was a total of 5 statues representing 5 different idols in my life. Deep down I believed that these idols would make my life perfect and I would be fully satisfied if I achieved what each idol said I needed to do. The thing was, each idol was a different impassible worldly expectation that was could never be achieved leaving the only failure. From each statue of the different idols was a tube running to the center of the temple. In each tube, there was this thick black liquid that Jesus told me was the lie “I am not good enough.” By believing in each idol, I was feeding my heart the lie that I would never be good enough. In the very back of the temple was the Cross. The Cross was pumping a white liquid into the center and Jesus told me that it was the truth about who I am. It was that I was worthy and belonging to the perfect Father and my original self is perfect because God created me to be perfect. In the center of the temple was my heart. My heart was the battleground of a war raging between the lies and truths that are in me.
In a continuation of this vision after a time to process what God just showed me, Jesus brought me directly back to this temple and I fell on my knees and cried out “God I don’t want these idols, I don’t was to be subject to lies and death, I just want you” and with that, Jesus grabbed His staff and destroyed the idols and the temple and everything went white. I woke up in a field with tons of flowers and Jesus looked at me and I knew that He had made my garden new.
—————————————————————————————————— A Time to Rest
God has shown me a lot about myself and the inner workings of my heart during my time in Costa Rica. He has asked me to rest with the knowledge that He has already given me and trust that He is transforming my heart for my last 2 weeks of ministry. At the end of the month, I will be a debrief at La Montana where the Lord has highlighted some sort of closure for this season of my life. But now I need to rest and focus on what God has already given me.
———————————————————— Debrief
The last week of Costa Rica, our squad had our midpoint debrief at La Montaña Christian camp. Debrief is a time of reflection over the past 3 months, and it was a great time to rest. The hard part about resting is trusting that the Father is transforming my heart and knowing that I am loved so deeply by the perfect creator. I can tell you now so confident that I am loved and can feel the love of God and it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. But instead of striving to be loved, I had “to be”. I sat during a time of worship and He softly spoke truth the echoed throughout me. I just sat and He filled my soul with truth. Our purpose is to be loved. God used Costa Rica to change my life, to bring light to the truth of who I am. I am a New Creation.
