Walking through pain with God is the way to encounter his heart. - January 16, 2022

Last year was a year of healing. It was a year of surrender. It was a year of God breaking out of a very small box that I kept him in. 2021 was hard for me, but it was the best year I have ever had. In my deepest heartache and pain I came face to face with God. The real God. Not the God I made him to be. Not the God the church makes him to be. The God of relationship. On New Year’s Day after another wrestling match with God, he told me something that has changed my life. He said, “My bride, the only way for your heart to be transformed is walking through your pain with me by your side”. The last 2 months have been the hardest months of my life. I have locked myself in my house. I have isolated myself from my friends and family. I have turned my phone off more times than I can count, just to get away. I have lost 10 pounds and I have not painted my nails in 3 weeks. I no longer care about keeping up with the Joneses nor am I afraid of being alone. These last 2 months, me and God have walked through all my lies, my pain, and my “bad Rachaels” to come face to face with the healer. To really grasp the truth of who God is. To stop worrying about religion and the law and to step into a true relationship with the lover of my soul. To pretend I am not a mess or that I am not still on this journey would be a lie. I have been on a roller coaster this whole time. I just spent most of the day fighting God today. But, God doesn’t want perfection, He wants my heart. He wants willingness. Here is my story of the biggest fight of my life, walking through my pain to came face to face with the lover of my soul.

This past year God made big promises to me. One of those promises I argued with him about writing down. “If this doesn’t come true, God, you will break me. Don’t tell me it will come true and then it does not.” In August it seemed that this promise was going to come true. I was even told by this person that God told him that he was the fulfillment of my promise. I have also been journaling in a prophetic journal all year. I wanted to step out in faith and began trying to hear God more clearly. I felt led to do this and I had done a lot of research on it the year before. Also, I started a daily journal on placing my hope in God. Now my prophetic journal had several entries on how God was going to bring me my promise and how great it would be. I finally had surrendered my promise to God with a genuine heart and boom – the next week, in walks my promise saying he is my promise. Now I did what I do best. I fought. But God convinced me this was my promise. So for the first time, I got excited and I had hope. Wow! Look what God does when you listen to him! We prayed the whole time and I got my prayer partners involved; everything was a green light. Yes, we had our problems but I trusted God to take care of them. But secretly behind closed doors I was a mess. I was insecure. I was not happy. I was low-key crazy. One day my promise walked away. I did not understand why. I was in limbo and I didn’t know why? I was mad. Three things hit me: Either, I don’t hear from God, even though every other promise was answered, or God is a liar who tricked me and does not keep his promises, or God was asking me to trust him and he was doing something amazing behind the scenes and it was going to make for a great testimony. After much prayer, I and my prayer partners believed the last one. Until 1 week turned into 1 month and 1 month turned into 2. The reality did not match what I believed God was saying. This caused a war in me and I have been in that war ever since.

In the 2 months that I have been at war with who I think God is and who the bible says God is, I have gone through some major things. I had to deal with things I thought I had been healed of. However, I discovered they were never healed. I had just covered them up. I have never chosen to go through my pain before. I used addictions, physical and emotional, or control to deal with my pain in my past. So the last 2 months have been a mixture of torture and healing. So please don’t judge too harshly when I talk about this next chapter that I had to go through. I want to be real and open here. I am going to be vulnerable because I am not the only Christian dealing with these issues. I am not the only Christian questioning their faith or the character of God. I don’t feel like we talk about this enough in the church. There are so many hurting people who are too scared to have a real relationship with God. They are too scared to ask him or anyone else questions. The truth is my questioning the character of God and wrestling with him is the only way that I was able to find truth. I am not saying it is the best way. But, feeling like God is a God who is scared to deal with my junk and feeling like he would strike me dead if I asked him a question or admitted my anger to him, is why a lot of Christians walk away. God is not scared of your junk. He is not scared of your anger. He is not scared of you questioning his character and expanding your knowledge of him. Even when I was angry and yelling at the top of my lungs, God never yelled back at me. Even when I doubted he was good, God never got mad at me. He always told me he loved me and answered my questions. I will be honest; several times during this process I thought about walking away. It took real conversations, talking to other people or watching movies about other people in pain and how messed up they were, for me to grow and heal in my pain. Please, church, I am begging you, when you encounter people in real pain don’t give a Christianized answer. Listen to them. Say you hear them and you are
praying for them. Or tell them about your real experience. People just want to know God. When you are dealing with the desire of your heart, something you’ve been praying for for 10 years and God said he was going to answer it….. the last thing you want to hear someone say is “well God will use it for his good”. Hearing that causes someone in pain like me to feel like “well then God isn’t good and I am out of here.” That is not how to help people who are hurting. 

This is my hardest chapter yet. To talk about the pain I had to walk through to get to my healing is not easy for me. However, I do think it will help people, so here it goes. 
The first bad Rachael I encountered was suicidal Rachael. I was so tormented when she showed up again. I thought she was taken care of 16 years ago. But no, she was just weighed down by the alcohol or drugs I decided to take to numb the pain when she would try to pop up again. In the first few weeks of struggling with who God was and why would he lie to me…. or why was my faith was so weak… the pain was so intense. When I found myself struggling with suicidal thoughts I wondered “how the hell did I get back to here?” I knew I needed help. Before I could get that help, I ran into 5 year old molested Rachael. Now I had never met her before. She had been shoved down so deep that I had almost forgotten about her. She, however, did not forget about me. She had been trying to protect me for years and she had felt like her choices had been stolen from her. She was a super controlling 5 year old. All my source of control and need to protect myself came from her. She just yelled at me over and over again….. “leave me alone! It was no big deal!” I was so numb by the end of trying to get rid of her, that I knew I needed help. So I got help. I started to realize that I DO have choices and God can protect me. I started to realize that I did not have to let my emotions control me anymore and started to choose to not act out of my emotions. I am not saying I am perfect, it is a choice and sometimes I fail. However, I am way better and guess what, suicide Rachael went away when molested Rachael was taken care of. It seems a 5 years old way of dealing with pain is to not deal with pain. Once she no longer was in control I could think more clearly. For a few days I had a lot of freedom…. until I decided to invite God into my heart as my bridegroom. There was 5 year old Rachael again! No one had ever made it to my heart like this and she was there waiting. After wrestling with God’s character for a little while, I decided to let the 5 year old rest and let God take over. Again, I had peace for a little while until I encountered my self-harm Rachael. This was a tricky Rachael because self-harm had hidden for many years. Self-harm Rachael did most of her harm with self-sabotage, over drinking, or causing harm in other ways. But, now that all the other addictions were gone, she showed back up with all of her fury. This scared me to death. I thought she was way gone. I was so exhausted and full of emotional pain and physical fatigue that I did not want to deal with her. But I did not come this far to go backwards so I prayed and boom she was gone. At this point I really hoped there were no more bad Rachael’s. I was so exhausted. The next day I felt someone tap my shoulder. I clenched my fist, I got ready for a fight. I thought “Oh no, I don’t want to do this anymore. I am so exhausted, but ok God… I promised I would walk through my pain with you so here we go.” I turned around to come face to face with God. I looked at him and he said “Rachael I am all that is left in your heart, will you accept me?” I melted. All these years all I wanted was God, but I had so much pain that I refused to walk through and here he was asking for me to choose him. I cried as I said yes and I had peace like I have never had before. I wish I could end the story here, but I still had to walk through some things. It is a constant journey and the next part is the most important part. 

I was struggling with understanding why I was so angry with God. I knew it was lies but the reality of my circumstances and past said otherwise. All I have ever known was a reality clouded in pain. God kept saying “accept my love, I love you so much.” I kept saying “If you love me so much why do I hurt all the time? How do I accept your love? Why did you take my promise? Do you love men more than women? Why do you let them get away with everything while we sit here praying for them and waiting on them to change their prideful hearts? Are you a good leader? Can I trust you? Right now I want to know you but I can’t get past my hurt.” I was watching a Christian documentary even though I was a mess and mad. In the documentary he talked about God being a relational God. How he doesn’t let our junk keep him from our love. He just wants to meet us where we are and have a relationship with us. Now I have heard this a million times but something just hit me differently. “Do I have a personal relationship with God? I have fasted, I have honored him, I have searched for him, but do I actually walk with him in the Garden naked and unashamed? Have I been living off the tree of knowledge, consumed with good and evil?” That was not how God designed me to be. He designed me to have a relationship with him. At this moment I said something that has changed the direction of my life for the last few weeks. “God, I choose to accept your love, to accept you as you are and have a relationship with you. I want to know you. Search my heart and clean me of all my lies.” Oh man there are those powerful prayers again. Since then I have been on a different path and journey. This is what I have learned…..

The most beautiful thing about God is you can tell him anything. I have hidden for years. Here is the truth: when you are introduced to sexuality at the age of 5, you have no way to comprehend what that means. A 5 year old mind can not understand sexuality because it is so limited and innocent. Satan took his opportunity to pervert my mind at such a young age. I did not know how to tell anyone about it. By the time I figured out what I was thinking was about sexuality, I was too ashamed to let anyone in and tell them about it. So I hid it and I felt extreme guilt. I hated my thoughts. I hated how I did not want to think the things I thought. I was 34 years old and had surrendered sex to God for the last 10 years, but I still had shame as if I was out there giving my body away the whole time. So I learned to hide from people and from God. I learned to try to be perfect. It consumed me. It destroyed me. During the last 2 months, God has healed me of this. He came in and he cleaned it out. I decided I am not hiding anymore. The fight, pain and roller coaster that I have been on for months now almost destroyed me and my relationship with God. I made a decision – God had free access to all my dirty, shameful, painful secrets. You know what he did? He healed them. He wasn’t ashamed of them. He wanted to fix them and make them into something beautiful. He made them into a testimony. God cares about every little part of me. Every small detail. He made me. He breathed life into me. He wants all of me. I had to let him break out of his box so he could heal me. In two months he has healed 3 years worth of prayers. Imagine what he can do with the next two months.

I learned that the most beautiful gift from God is you have choices and you can take every thought captive. God does not want prisoners. He wants you to give him your free will so he can fix you. I have learned there is only one solution to freedom. It is not easy but it is at the same time. I wake up every morning and I make a choice. Do I want to give God my will today or do I want to act out of my own way. Do I trust God and have faith that if I give him my will he will make something beautiful happen. I can choose to not let my emotions control me. I can choose to go to God’s word and live off of that instead of what my physical eyes see. In the last week I have not been on a roller coaster. When I have emotions that tell me to give up or how this is not fair, I choose to read the Word instead or repeat Scriptures. I basically choose to not get on the roller coaster. I also choose not to run to other people anymore to get their opinions. Everyone has good intentions but they are not God. His thoughts are higher than ours and he knows what he is doing. It is my choice to believe him even when I don’t understand or it does not make sense. I can choose to let my thoughts be idle and go in the direction of the enemy or to take each thought captive and give it to God and have crazy faith. I used to say I did not have much faith. I actually prayed for more faith (yeah, I should have known where that would lead 😉, the truth is I always had faith. However, I usually put that faith in the enemy’s hands. You have faith, because you always believe in something – either God’s plan or the enemy’s. It’s your choice who you want to put that faith in. I recommend God’s plan. Trust me, this struggle would have been a lot easier and shorter lived if I would have done that in the first place. I also learned to merge my will into God’s will. Therefore the only will that is left in me is God’s. This is also a choice. I wake up everyday and say, “God I choose to have your will and not my own today.” I repeated this a lot throughout the day. Last week God had me do some interesting things. I may never know why but I must believe it was to love one of his children. God’s nature only allows for one thing, to love. He has no other nature so to choose his will is to choose love. It also means it is in my best interest and for my good to choose his will in my life. This life is no longer my own, it is God’s. What a relief to no longer have to fight my own battles, to worry about tomorrow, or control something I never had control of anyway. 

The most beautiful thing that I have learned is God loves broken people. The bigger the mess I was, the more God talked to me, sent people to love me and speak truth to me. He literally guided every step of my healing. I just read something the other day about surrendering and asking forgiveness from inner vows we make. I have made like 500 of them. But those vows keep me from God’s will in my life. I was not going to read this book, but a friend encouraged me to read it. It took us 10 more weeks to read it then it was supposed to. However, I read that at the exact time I was supposed to. God is so good. He knows exactly how and when to walk you through things. His way is loving, his yoke is easy and his timing is perfect. Today he reminded me about a blog I wrote about my dog Tebow years ago. It was perfect for my situation now. I encourage you to read the blog I wrote a few years ago called “How God used a dog to show me his love”. In 2 months God took his very broken, angry, and exhausted daughter and he healed her. I have been praying for years for the freedom he gave me in the last 2 months. I had to be willing to admit I was broken. I had to stop hiding and be honest and real with him. I had to yell. I had to fight. I had to be a completely crazy person (for real, I can’t believe my neighbors did not call the cops with all that yelling. I already know my dogs think I am crazy). At the end of myself and the mess that I truly was, God was there. Waiting for me. Hands open wide. He just wanted to love me. He just wanted to heal me. He just wanted a relationship with me. I had just got done yelling at him, blaming him and all he wanted was me. Broken, messed up, tired, complaining me. I will never understand why, but I know God has a heart for the broken. A special love that heals all wounds. He does it in his own unique way. I have been praying for a miracle this whole time. Turns out the miracle is me. I get to be the main character in his love story. What a blessing and honor it is to be the bride of Christ, to be a daughter of a king. 

I hope at the end of this blog you understand one thing. I don’t care how broken you think you are, how unworthy you feel. I don’t care what you have done and how many people you have hurt. I don’t care if you feel you have nothing to offer. God says and thinks differently than you feel. God loves you. God wants you. God has a story for you. He wants you to be the main character in his love story that he wrote uniquely for you. I don’t care how dirty you feel or how broken you are. The more broken you are, the more God loves you. The more he can heal you. The more your story will touch others. Don’t let your brokenness keep you from the greatest love, freedom, or healing you will ever know. There is no situation God can’t fix or he can’t heal. Just let him in. Walk through your pain with him to find his heart. Maybe don’t fight him so hard, but hey you might lose 10 pounds in the process 😉 I love you all and I am here for you. Nothing will scare me away from loving you and praying for you. Shoot you can see I have seen and been through a lot in my own life.