Dear Friends: This is a blog I wrote early in July concerning my experience on the first Saturday after I arrived in Kansas City. Holy Spirit did an amazing operation on my heart that morning. Later in the day, when I went to our Simeon Company orientation, I received prayer that confirmed God's love for me, even in my brokenness.
And it is with great joy in my heart and deep appreciation to the God Who heals us, that I share with you that several weeks later God delivered me from my dependence on these medications, and He has made me whole in my body!
Before posting this, I first shared it with the group from home who have been interceding for months for these 'addicted and mentally ill ones'. Please join us in continued pray for these little ones held captive by addiction and mental illness.
In His Love,
Kathy
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Who would have thought that my journey into relationship with Jesus would begin at the place of addiction? Only God.
For years I've been on a medication regimen for a condition called fibromyalgia. Although initially diagnosed in 1990, I began to experience serious, debilitating flare-ups in the early years of the 2000's. The flare-ups became so bad that they led to my retirement in 2009 from a career in the utility industry where I had worked for 23 years. Although healing of fibromyalgia was spoken over me in 2006, and I had confessed that healing on numerous occasions, I was never fully free of the symptoms, including the lack of sleep which is a big trigger. Right around the time I retired I began with a new doctor who put me on a medication regimen that freed me from the symptoms. Over the years since then, though, it's always nagged at me that I've continued to confess I am healed, but I never wanted my medications to be far from my reach. A few times over the years I've actually weaned myself off of them, but I always went back while I've continued to ask God to deliver me.
It was when I arrived in Kansas City, medications in hand, that I realized neither of the meds I take for the fibromyalgia (fibro) had any refills left on them. When I called my primary doctor, much to my shock and dismay, she refused to refill them and directed me to my rheumatologist. Well, I had stopped going to the specialist for several reasons, and my primary doctor was my only link to getting these two meds refilled. I called her a second time a few days later and again she refused the refills. I began to panic.
One med, the one that helps me sleep, was completely empty. I tried replacing it with an over-the-counter natural alternative, but it didn't work. After spending several restless nights, when I awoke that Saturday morning in early July, I was overcome with fear of the fibro symptoms returning. I actually experienced a desperation for the two medications that were either empty or soon to be empty. The realization struck me that these were symptoms of addiction. But the even deeper fear was that now I was going to have to TRUST GOD to deliver me, there was no Plan B.
When I was young, my mother was addicted to pain medications, prescription drugs, and alcohol. As I sat in my bed that Saturday morning, weeping in fear at the predicament I saw myself in, Holy Spirit brought to mind my mother and her struggles during my growing up years. He showed me that I had lived in a place of judgment over her for many, many years. Mom eventually overcame the addictions to meds and alcohol, although how she did it I never knew. But at the end of her life she loved Jesus with all her heart. The years when we were kids were not easy for her nor for our family. Holy Spirit filled me with a compassion for my mother that, in all of my 63 years, I had never before known.
Holy Spirit also brought to my mind the many months seven of us from my church have been praying for release from addiction and mental illness for a number of acquaintances and loved ones. He showed me a religious spirit and cavalier attitude in my prayer for these addicted ones, a 'get over it and move on with your life' attitude beneath the surface of my pious prayers. I needed to repent and let compassion well up there, also.
In the way only God can do, after I repented of my self-righteousness, Holy Spirit spoke to my heart: "I AM the God that healeth thee, and every knee shall bow before Me, in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, even the god of addiction." Amen, Lord, so be it.
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