Shabbat Shalom! Michael,
I don't spend a lot of time on facebook. I have four homeschooled children, a part-time job, etc to keep me plenty busy. I so wanted to reply to your message. It is always a blessing to meet another sojourner. Your testimony demonstrates your faith. This life is a trial as you said. I, like you, have set my eyes on passing with flying colors or at least a B+.:) if I can help it. You spoke of "truth". That is the very thing that I prayed to receive. In fact, it's all that really matters. It is all that has lasting worth. I wanted "truth" more than anything. I nearly traded everything for it too! My awakening came beginning about five years ago. I was pregnant with my last child and only daughter. During the weeks following the sonogram that told us we would have a GIRL, my husband had a dream that the enemy was going to try to take her from us. I put it out of my mind and asked that he not talk about it. Later on during a regular prenatal checkup, I casually refused a simple yet nausiating glucose screening and was promptly told that if I didn't want to do as I was told, I needn't plan on having my baby with that doctor or any other doctor in that hospital.
I was 32 weeks pregnant! This ultimatum took me by complete surprise and I wasn't about to surrender myself and my child to these people who could care less about discussing my opinions or values concerning our health.
In my spirit, I heard YHVH ask a profound, yet simple question of me. He said, "Who do you trust?" Well, my honest answer was that I trusted Him. I proceeded to search out and locate an underground midwife. I couldn't understand why all of this had happened, but I knew that for whatever reason, I was more afraid of having this child in the hospital than I was of having her with no one but God at my side if need be.
As I walked each day before she was to be born, I asked the Father why after having three healthy children in the hospital, was I now being led into what seemed to everyone around me as an extreme situation. Again, I was assured in my spirit that I would know why when she was born. My midwife lived an hour away. I called her after my second strong contraction at around 2:30 am when my husband came home from work. I could never have anticipated the speed of my labor based upon my previous three births. The midwife barely arrived in time to catch my only daughter who was born within one hour from the time of my first contraction.
In the weeks prior to her birth, I had taken a crash course in the differences between hospital vs. home birth. What I found out, truly awakened my ability to question the construct of our whole society. I know, without a shadow of a doubt that YHVH preserved her life that morning. Had we even made it to the hospital (a 45 minute drive) that morning, she would have been rushed to ICU, placed on a respirator, given a blood transfusion and any other intervention that would have allowed them to say they had done all that they could. She did not breath immediately at birth. The waters were dark with meconium. She came so fast, she must have been in shock.
The midwife gave her CPR and was visibly unnerved. She handed her to me. With a shaky voice, she said, "Talk to your baby." While everyone attending seemed frightened, I had a perfect peace I cannot describe. I simply held her and spoke her name, saying "Emma, all is well, all is well." She pinked up, chirped a bit as if to say," What's the big deal, I'm here aren't I?" She weighed nine lbs. six oz. The biggest of all! The people at church seemed to shun my talking of it as the miraculous event that it was. Little did I know, I would not be in "church" much longer and that I would find that most of them were not at all my spiritual family anyway.
The next thing to hit me square between the eyes was a local pirate radio station broadcast about the Trade Center attacks. Oh my! That information knocked me off my feet, caused 18 months of insomnia, with my rear planted in a chair in front of the computer trying to disprove this crazy but convincing conspiracy theory. I prayed for truth, right? The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The truth is we have an enemy that roams about seeking whom he may devour through deceptions if not by our own rebellion.
He doesn't appear as dark and sinister, he appears as the expert, as the trusted institutions and governing administrations of this world system. His methods are polished and appear as necessary. I didn't really understand the wickedness in high places concept before coming face to face with TRUTH. It has a way of defining lies as well. It divides houses, as you know well. It pierces the heart and brings our convictions and what we love to the surface. It transforms those people, who will let it, into peculiar people.
I figure we are like watchmen on the wall for those who are not yet awake to the world around them. My husband and I tried to talk about the things we were finding with our pastor. he ignored us for six months before finally claiming the "rapture" would happen before anything bad happened here in America and that we needed to come back to church and be quiet.
I had already discovered the origins of the "rapture" theory and knew that no generation before has been exempt from tribulations of all sorts. America is no different. The "Left Behind" idea was only 150 years old and I'd better not count on it.
My husband and I became political activists for a couple of long years, meeting so many amazing, educated and bold people. I never knew people existed who were so passionate about truth before. Yet, for me, so much in the political arena is rigged and financially out of reach that I soon realized this is not the way to overcome evil.
I had been searching the scriptures for some time with my mother's Strong's concordance. But when I discovered E-sword.....everything began to come into focus. What took 2 hours to discover with a Strong's book and one-word searches, I could accomplish in 15 minutes with whole phrases. Wow!
My husband was already a history buff and I had begun to dig into the history of Protestantism and the Catholic influences on our faith. E-sword could answer questions as fast as we could ask them.The sign of the covenant came first into my practice. But my husband wasn't exactly keeping pace with me on the spiritual revelations I was having and the conclusions I was coming to. He grew up in our small town and I think he wasn't sure how he could live here with such radically different beliefs about literally everything that everyone else held as "normal". I felt almost like he blamed me somehow for where we were in our understanding at that time. It was disturbing to look around and have absolutely no one to validate your thoughts or to relate to what was happening as our paradigm shifted quite completely.
YHVH began giving us like-minded friends to fill the void we didn't think could be filled in our rural Alabama town. One family was only a 5 minute drive from our house and two more families were within 20 miles. That is another story of a miracle. All because I bought a dairy goat from a lady who was a good listener. She lived 40 miles away and knew a family that lived 100 miles from her who knew my brother and sister in Yeshua who live over the hill from me. I had never heard the word "messianic" before and don't necessarily adhere to the labeling now, but these were my people, lovers of truth. They were right on time! I was about to be tested again.
My husband and I had constant contentions and strife over his relationship with alcohol for all of our 15 year marriage. As I turned more and more to the Word for instruction, he dove deeper into the bottle. All my years of trying to earn, then beg, then demand his sobriety and love finally disintegrated into something that I could no longer control. I finally let go of him and any hope of restoration of what was lost. As I gave him up and packed up, he put himself into a 6 month faith-based treatment facility leaving us penniless and on our own. Amazingly YHVH provided in ways that I never could have foreseen. He lined up work for a 12 year stay at home mom within the first week that paid over $1000. His provision multiplied over the course of those months. We should have lost everything, but five months later, our finances were stable. Rusty returned home sober, with a job, with a solid desire for the will of God in his life, and has now been sober for two long years. Everyday that is still a miraculous event. He is daily astounding me with the wisdom and calming assurance that he has acquired from YHVH to care for his family, traits that were not there at all for 15 years that I've known him.
I, like you, desire to do the will of Him who has called me out of darkness and into his marvelous light. I just want you to be encouraged today and to know that you have a friend indeed down here in Alabama. Your 'Getting Started' page on your blog is just the sort of thing that is needed for those who are diligently seeking the Elohim of Israel from all the nations where they have been scattered. I will promote it. I have started my own blog more as a place to write and to store my writing. I work on the computer and run a household, so I currently only have one article on there. I have more than that I have written but haven't had time to upload it yet. Please visit and share your thoughts. http://www.awakeoisrael.blogspot.com
I love Sabbath for the rest and refreshment of true fellowship. It is my delight to have made your acquaintance,dear brother. I am reading a book right now that you may find interesting. It is by Jacques Ellul, a French professor of history and sociology and an expertise in Roman law,born in 1912, also author of some 40 books. This one is a later work entitled "The Subversion of Christianity",published in 1985 just before the American messianic "movement" really began. It fascinates me when I find others who see so many of the same things I can see and I am so less educated than they. That is YHVH's doing and it is marvelous in my eyes.
Talk to you soon, I hope,
Sunny
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