Last weekend I attended the Women of Faith Conference. Sandi Patty was one of the featured speakers. Inspired by her presentation, I purchased her new book entitled, "Layers". The book talks about the layers of protection that we put on ourselves throughout life as a result of pain, heartache, loss, etc. While I have been unable to identify a specific event in my life that caused me to "layer" myself, I am certainly aware that my layers go deep and are very thick.
As a result of my sanctification experience last fall, I had already begun to unlayer myself a little bit. As I accepted God's love and His place as Lord of my life, it has been a natural transition to start tearing down some of the walls I have put up around me and trust Him to take care of me. However, as I am reading this book, I am realizing that I have just begun to unlayer and simply said, I will be unlayering probably for a lifetime.
Through this process, God has once again shown me how much He cares for me. Let me just share with you the intimacy we shared this week. Most recently, I have not been able to really connect with God during my devotional time, but I have perservered and continued to saturate myself with Him. As I was leaving home to head off to prayer meeting on Wednesday night, my car, which just got out of the shop after almost 6 weeks, decided to start acting up again. In frustration, I had to turn around and head back home. The temptation was to just forget prayer meeting and stay home. However, because I know the enemy's tactics, I chose to go to prayer meeting anyway. So Kaitlyn and I headed off in Kerry's 'vette for the church.
Typically, it is difficult for me to switch gears from the drive and rush of the day to coming straight into an attitude of prayer. However, it was incredibly easy this week. As soon as I put my purse down, I was able to sense the thickness of the Holy Spirit in the room and I immediately began praying. The song that was playing in the background was about today being a new day, by Alberto & Kimberly Rivera. I am finding that I love praying with their music playing in the background. It is so annointed. As I prayed and listened to the lyrics, I realized that Kaitlyn and I had been talking about this very topic on the way to church. I had literally just encouraged her to choose to let things go when she has a bad day and take advantage of every opportunity to be happy. At first, I chocked this up to a coincidence.
However, as prayer meeting continued, I began to get distracted and frustrated in the fact that I felt I hadn't really connected with God lately. I have been doing all the right things, and prayed that He would reveal any sin in my life to me so that I could confess it, but honestly I just felt like my prayers were hitting the ceiling and not understanding why. As I was still in this mindset, Kevin came over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder. He began to pray for me. His prayer was that I would see myself beautiful, as God sees me and that God would give me a new confidence in myself.
My first reaction to Kevin's prayer was that he knows my poor self image because of my weight, so that was a pretty safe prayer to pray over me. However, I don't believe that was the case. You see, the night before I had just read a chapter in the book that talked about how God sees me as a princess. So my prayer that night was about this very issue...me seeing myself the way that God sees me...as beautiful.
Kevin moved on and continued praying with others and encouraged us all to listen to the Spirit and not be afraid of allowing the Spirit to say anything to anyone else in the room through us. I continued in my prayer asking God to tell me specifically if He wanted to use my voice to say anything to anyone in the room. Nothing...
I began to start thinking about God's promises, but instead of being grateful for them and claiming them, I started feeling like I don't deserve His promises...again just really feeling disconnected and in turmoil. Knowing one thing in my head and feeling another in my heart.
Soon Dawn Rittenhouse came over to me and told me that she felt like God wanted her to tell me He is proud of me, and that He does not wish for me to fear anything. Those were wonderful words to hear. We prayed together and she went back to her seat. Afterward, I felt impressed to tell Violet the same thing...that God is proud of her and that He wants to use her in the Senior Adult Ministy at our church. We prayed together and I went back to my seat.
Here is where the story becomes so incredibly personal to me. As I sat down, I immediately noticed the lyrics to the song that was playing. It is called, Royalty.
I saw you as a little girl putting these beautiful dresses on, Saying “Mommy, Daddy look at me, look at the beautiful princess that I am.” You dressed well for the part because I say you are a queen. You are royalty, royalty. And I remember looking upon your face. And I remember washing over you with my tears because I saw the very day that you stopped believing that you were a princess and my heart broke, and my tears flew down. My tears flew down like a river.
And now I say I am gathering you, gathering every piece of your heart that’s been scattered and I am making it new, making it new. And your countenance shall reflect the mirror that I place before you because you are to know that when I see you, I see the queen that I created.
So what will you decree? What do you want to see? What will you decree? What do you want to see?
And this day, this day is your coronation day. This day you are being crowned. You are being crowned and a scepter is being placed in your hand. For you are worthy, you are worthy. And I shall present you to the nations. And I shall roll out my red carpet and you shall walk true with these because you were made, you were made to be a queen. You were made, you were made to be seen.
And I see you, I see you, I see you. And I hear you, even when you whisper. I hear you whisper…
Now, this is NO coincidence. God had my whole evening scripted. And as only He can do, He touched my heart once again. He is so loving and kind. I am so crazy about Him. I am reminded of a verse in Song of Songs 4:9 where God says to ME, "You've stolen my heart, my sister, my bride. You've stolen my heart."
As the evening wore on, He gently reminded me that He loves me and that His promises are for me no matter what I am "feeling" at any moment. He gave me this verse in Phillipians 1:6, "that He who began a good work in me will see it on to completion".
So if it takes a lifetime, I will continue to shed these protective layers and instead wrap myself in a robe of His righteousness.
I love Him so much...
