Mikki's Blog - Living in the Grace and Love of God » truth

When the Truth Crashes Through

Mikki — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:07:46 +0000

The words hit me. I felt their impact as if I’d run full-force into a brick wall in the middle of the night. My soul reverberated from the impact. It was as if layers of dried up mud had suddenly cracked open and began to fall off my heart and mind, piece by piece, bit by bit, chunk by chunk.

I had come face to face with truth. Oh, the truth had been there all along, but I had not known it. I’d not been willing or able to see it. The dried muddy layers of denial and resistance and repression which I’d used to protect myself from pain suddenly were cracked open enough for the truth to begin to penetrate my heart and mind.

The words had challenged me, confronted me, and purposefully lured me into the trap and the trap was baited with truth. And the truth began to do its work.

When Jesus said “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” he was speaking to people who sincerely believed they knew the truth, yet their reality was, they were in bondage. They were deceived, and the problem with deception is that, well, it’s deceptive.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

All of us have areas of our lives where we are blinded. Things we don’t see. Things we don’t know.

God is committed to us to show us these blind spots, these bondages. His commitment includes using everything that comes along in our lives, whether things of our own making, the making of others, things from His hand or things from the enemy, to bring us more fully to the truth because the truth sets us free.

Rohr says it this way, “As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.”

Known truth, acknowledged truth, received truth, has the inherit power to bring freedom. It’s like a seed which brings forth its fruit in its time. Just as a seed reproduces its own kind, (an apple seed brings an apple tree), truth reproduces truth. When we acknowledge and receive truth into our heart, it can spread and grow and reproduce, bringing freedom.

This whole process is one of making us more like Christ, who is truth.

Unfortunately, most humans resist change. We resist truth many times. We opt to stay in our bondage because to change would be too risky, too unknown. We find we have come to be comfortable in our mud.

Yet when revelation comes, as it did for me that day, we have a choice. We can choose to remain as we are and scramble to rebuild our brick walls, or we can choose to embrace truth, allowing it to bring its deep work of healing and change into our hearts and minds.

When have you been confronted with truth?

Ever had any moments when you felt as if you’d run into a brick wall full-force in the dead of the night?

Ever had someone speak words of truth to you that opened you up to see what you’d never seen before?

God is inviting you to acknowledge truth. Own your stuff. Own your story. Step into light and begin the journey to freedom. Allow the water of God’s love to wash off the layers of denial, distortion, resistance, and whatever else is keeping you from freedom.

When you do, you will have begun to walk in a journey ordained by God Himself, a journey of truth. A journey to freedom.

When the Truth Crashes Through

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With God in the Valley

Mikki — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:39:45 +0000

Recently I’ve been pondering how God leads me, at times, into the valley of the shadow of death, where life is uncertain, the terrain is difficult, and it’s just downright scary at times.

color:#4F3C30">Well, you might say, “God doesn’t do that.” Uh, I beg to differ. The Psalmist David, the one God Himself said was a “man after my own heart”, invited us to explore the reality of walking in that valley. Job, who was called “a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil”, certainly walked through the valley. Jesus Himself was “driven into the wilderness” to be tempted, and on the cross he faced the greatest darkness, as he took my sin and your sin and the sin of all humanity on himself and cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

color:#4F3C30">The mysteries of human suffering are beyond our grasp, and yet God invites us into them. While I do not believe that God causes evil and I understand that all evil and pain in the world are a result of the work of the enemy, I do believe that God uses human suffering to change us.

color:#4F3C30">In the valley, we struggle and grasp for answers. We wish we could explain the workings of God and the workings of evil in neat theological boxes and all the while God is whispering to us that it’s not so much understanding that we need but a releasing of our need to understand.

color:#4F3C30">Yes, God wants us to learn through our struggles and our suffering. Yes, God wants to give us insight, but beyond that God desires to lead us to the point where we can trust Him in the midst of our suffering.

color:#4F3C30">Frankly, I’ve flunked that test more times than I’ve passed. Oh, I passed lots of easy tests. The true/false ones. The fill-in-the-blank ones. But the essays! How I’ve hated those! The ones where I have to process through and come to a conclusion.

color:#4F3C30">Yet learning to trust God is a lot like those essay tests; a long and purposeful journey. Trusting God is a lifelong process. While I may be quite comfortable trusting God in one area of my life, I may find that I am completely unable and often unwilling to trust Him in another.

color:#4F3C30">And He knew that before He invited me to come into relationship with Him. He didn’t require my perfection. He knew my story before it began to be written. Through my story, He pursues my heart, wooing me to Himself. He challenges me to open new areas of my heart to Him. He asks me to live in the mystery.

color:#4F3C30">The work of God in me is “inside out”. I may be able to fake most of you off. You might spend an hour with me and think I’ve got it all together. You might even attend my church and think I’m a super Christian (you know what I mean, the ones with the S on their cape). But nothing in me is hidden from God. My times in the valley expose the depths of who I am and what I really believe about God, life, and myself. God is able to handle the truth about who I am and where I need to grow. He is committed to lead me into that truth, enabling me to face my own personal truths with His Spirit, and giving me extravagant grace to change.

color:#4F3C30">Sometimes the changes are easy, but often they come like winning a war, one battle at a time. The battles leave me wounded at times. Scarred. Limping like Jacob, but if I find what God is offering me, I leave the battle with deeply understood truth about who I am and who He is. Such truth leads me into new levels of trust. Surely such a God who would walk with me through the valley, correcting me at times, comforting me often, is worthy of my trust!

color:#4F3C30">My journey is much like peeling an onion, layer after layer of my resistance, my need to control, compare, and compete, get peeled away and I become more able to face the naked truth about myself and my life. I can live in the paradoxes. I can live in the mysteries, and I can say with the Psalmist David, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…I know you are with me.”

With God in the Valley

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Wake Up!

Mikki — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:46:57 +0000

A busy ministry schedule has limited my time to blog, but I want to give a quick update.

This is a land of great darkness, but more than that, it is a land of great need of the light of God’s love. Our ministry here has focused on sharing the love of God to the people of Thailand and also to Jason and Sarah Ricketts, who are missionaries here.

I have walked the streets of Pattaya where there are thousands of prostitutes and hundreds of bars. Men come here from around the world for sex. Young girls and boys sell their bodies in order to make money. They are often illiterate and have no marketable skills other than their very body. The damage to their souls is beyond measure. Yet there are some here who are endeavoring to share God’s love. They teach free English classes. They teach marketable skills. They provide counseling for the trauma; most of the young girls have been raped more than once. So many have come here in order to honor their families by providing financially for them. That is important in this culture. Most families know their girls come here to work in the bars. They know their girls will become prostitutes. It is an acceptable means of employment. However, most know nothing of the horrors these young girls will experience. And once the girls experience the horrors of prostitution, instead of honor, they find intense shame and feel unable to go back to their families. Isnt’ that the enemy’s classic strategy? Empty promises and bondage in the very place you thought would bring freedom.

And of course, there is the slave market which is another story entirely. Behind closed doors, there are young people and children, yes children, who are sex slaves. These did not come here on their own choosing. Their parents have been offered education and jobs for their children, but the reality is they are either tricked or deceived into this lifestyle or many are kidnapped, and then smuggled across national boundaries, raped and traumatized in order to gain power over them, threatened, and then enslaved. They don’t speak Thai or English. They are afraid and powerless. And in the midst of all this, prostitution is illegal.

It is more than I can explain to you. I strongly recommend you order Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone. It will trouble you. It will disturb you. It will awaken you from any illusions you have that slavery is a thing of the past. It will inspire you to care, to speak on behalf of the weak. It will bring forth an abolitionist spirit inside you. It will change you if your heart is alive. The message is God’s message: Justice is for all. Would you submit your heart to God and just ask Him if you should read this book? For me, it was a point of realizing I had had my head stuck in the American illusionary sand and God had said, "Wake up!" We are inexcusable when we experience God’s love and refuse to share it. Not all are called to travel, but most are called to give, to support, to encourage people like Jason and Sarah. All are called to be informed. As God awakens our hearts, may you and I be faithful to care in tangible ways for anything less is cotton candy. And although denial may be our preferred mechanism of dealing with the hard realities of life, it is the truth that will make us free and our freedom should always call us to fight for others to have the same freedom.

Arise, O Sleeper!

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. Bull all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light. For whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore He says, "Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light." Ephesians 5:21

And remember, the truth brings freedom when it is acted upon.

Wake Up!

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