Nepal is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been in. I could see the beauty before our plane even touched down. Once we arrived in the city I knew I wouldn’t want to leave this country.
Our first week in Nepal was a time of coming together with our entire squad to debrief and have a time of rest. We stayed in a hotel with hot water, real showers, breakfast pancakes, some bomb street food at every corner, and I had my whole squad full of people I love all around me. It was all I could ask for in that time, but the Lord decided that He wanted more for me. More didn’t include material items though. He wanted more for me spiritually.
My month in Ghana was so amazing, but incredibly busy. I knew there were more things that the Lord was stirring in my heart that I needed to address, but I kept pushing it off until I had that space I knew I was going to have a debrief. The time was now. I had all the people I could process with. I had my leadership team there to help guide me through it. I even had the time set aside for me to just be with the Lord and allow Him to show me everything I needed to see.
I opted out of spending time with my squad to spend time with the Lord and process through what this past month had brought for me. I knew something I had been struggling with was comparison. I began asking Him why I constantly compare myself to others, and asking why in the world I struggled so much with my self-worth. For the next few hours the Lord started revealing all His truths about who He sees me to be, and what He has called me to. It was an incredible time that left me with so much peace and a sense of awe of how great He is.
I left that time with the Lord feeling like a new person ready to take on the world…until six hours later.
That afternoon I spent time with my girls at the spa, and we ended up being late to our session with the team that afternoon. When we got to the session I received some feedback about being late and how that looks for team leaders to come late to a meeting. Seemingly innocent and isolated situation that I should have taken feedback from and done better about during the future. Right?
Wrong. For the next hour as I sat through that session and took that small piece of feedback and allowed myself to shame spiral about my mistake. I took being ten minutes late to a meeting to an unreal level of condemnation in my mind. After the meeting, I made sure to apologize to my leaders about my error, and it was apparent that they could see the shame building all over my face. They immediately spoke truth into me assuring me that there should be no shame or condemnation, just moving forward and being more mindful of it in the future.
I allowed the enemy to take over my thoughts and control the direction of my emotions. Instead of going out to dinner with my friends I went up to the roof and began crying. I knew that being ten minutes late to a meeting wasn’t what this was about. I began asking the Lord how.
How can I go from having these wonderful moments with Him where He is revealing so much truth to me about myself, to six hours later going on a shame spiral of questioning and criticizing myself over the smallest of things? I should be past this moment in my spiritual walk. I should have this down by now and know these truths that you have been speaking to me. This is the same problem different decade. Why?
I was not prepared for what the Lord was about to bring up for me. He began pulling at wounds from my past that I thought I had already addressed and dealt with. I found myself in a completely new state of brokenness as I allowed the Lord to show me things that have brought a lot of pain in my life. I started arguing with the Lord trying to tell Him that these are things that I have already dealt with, but He began showing a whole new layer of how it has affected my self-worth all these years without me even realizing it.
The enemy has had me rooted in lies since the time I was a child that I grew up accepting as truth. He used a painful time of my past to root lies into my spirit telling me that I wasn’t worth anything and never enough for anyone. This cycle of never fully understanding my self-worth is because I have never looked at the root of it. I can’t expect to bear different fruits in my mind if I am constantly trying to grow from those roots. I need to dig out the lies that the enemy has spoken into my life for years and replace them with the truth that the Lord has already given me.
The truth is that He settled my worth at the cross. The truth is that He deems me as worthy. My father has called me to great things to grow His kingdom and the enemy can no longer hold me captive in this battle occurring in my mind. I am no longer a prisoner of war because I have been freed from his lies.
It isn’t as simple as saying those words though. I can claim them as though they are already so, but the fact is, this is still an ongoing battle in my mind. I am having to take those thoughts captive that the enemy is bringing against me and ask the Lord what He has to say about them every single day.
So there you go, the girl that is supposed to have it all together in a lot of people’s minds—doesn’t. The missionary that is out somewhere in the world telling other people about the freedom they can walk in is still trying to grasp true freedom herself.
There is never a “getting there” in your walk with the Lord. We are always growing and learning new things about ourselves every day. Our goal is Kingdom and this race doesn’t end at the end of this trip. This year is showing me that I can go from dancing on the rooftops with the most beautiful views one day, to crying in a state of brokenness the next. The Lord has brought me so far in my journey with Him from the time that I accepted Him into my life, and I pray that He never quits revealing new things to me that I need to work through. It just turns out that this particular struggle requires me to take steps back into my past before I can move forward.
All for now, until we see what else the Lord want to bring up.
My prayer for now is that you continue praying over me while I walk through this new season with the Lord. He is showing me some pretty wonderful things about myself as I work on uprooting the things the enemy has been holding me in. I also would love for you to be praying over my team and my squad. We are all in this journey together, but each of them looks very different. As I am walking through this with the Lord my team is going through their own walks towards true freedom. Pray over K-Squad.
