Note

Most of this material first appeared in my book,  How I Learned to Let God Find Me in the Good Times and the Bad: A Spiritual Memoir (published 2018).

Introduction

This article series, Parts 1 – 4, makes the assumption that you already know how to experience the Lord’s love directly, firsthand, for yourself, whenever you wish or need it.

 You see, it’s the regular, repeated, firsthand, experience of His love that SUSTAINS, NOURISHES, PROTECTS and HEALS you during your crisis —leading you to true victory that lasts!

If you don’t know how to experience God’s love whenever you wish or need it, please get my FREE Guide which teaches you in 2 clear, simple steps exactly how to do this.

And make sure you also get its extremely popular and encouraging accompaniment, ‘Relax Your Body’.  Pin this resource on your wall where you can easily see it when you need God’s help urgently, or at any time. And please share both resources with anyone you know who needs the Lord’s help, especially during a personal crisis.

 You see, when you go through a steep crisis in your life, simply seeking advice won’t cut the mustard. No. At this point you need to be able to directly experience the Lord’s LOVE whenever you want or need it.

Why?

 Because at the end of the day, it’s only when you KNOW deep, deep inside you that your are LOVED profoundly by the Lord just as you are —warts , crises, sins, weaknesses, negative emotions, and all —that LASTING  healing —spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional.

 And there’s another reason why this is hugely important: when you open yourself to the Lord’s direct presence and experience His love directly, you and the Lord become deeply bonded. Trust develops. You begin to feel safe enough to let the Lord truly become God for you. You allow Him to take full responsibility for guiding you through your crisis.

The Lord takes full responsibility for guiding you through your crisis and for seeing to it that you emerge from your crisis 

• victorious
• with your mental, spiritual, emotional and physical health intact
• stronger
• freer
• with a far deeper love for the Lord, YOURSELF, and others! 

And there’s one final reason why this is critically important: it’s only when you know how to experience God’s love firsthand for yourself —whenever you want or need to —that  the Lord can start to heal your ‘false self’.

And unless you allow the Lord to heal your false self, all the other problems that your crisis has already brought about will be far more difficult to overcome!   

The Really Good News for You

The really good news is that as you open yourself up repeatedly to God’s love, God himself undertakes the healing of your false self. (You see, your false self is too entrenched and strong for you to heal it yourself.) 

You therefore accomplish 2 things in one: overcoming your crisis constructively AND healing your false self at the same time.

It’s a precious win-win.

During my first steep crisis at the age of 35, in answer to my heartfelt plea for help, the Lord used a holy Christian woman guide to teach me the utter necessity of both things: i. e.

• how to experience directly God’s love firsthand for myself
• the need to allow Him to heal my false self

Note

At the very same time, and using my holy guide again, the Lord provided me with ongoing training in the Enneagram . This development was completely unexpected. In fact, the Lord seemed to have me directly in his sights: He used a co-author of the world’s very first book on the Enneagram (published just a few months before) to teach me this unusually accurate and impactful map of human personality.

The Enneagram was (and remains) a huge help in understanding the genuine giftedness of our ‘true’ selves and the roots, function, and drawbacks of our ‘false’ selves. For 26 years, I have taught the basics of the Enneagram theory to all the Christian women I’ve guided. Each one testifies to its huge help in genuinely understanding themselves for the first time —their false self as well as their true self —and the ways in which their false self influences their life negatively, while their true self influences it positively.

By the time, therefore, that the second steep crisis of my life descended (which is the crisis I cover in this article series), I was able to rely on all 3 of these things to bring me the profound healing and victory that I needed. I can assure you that the ‘signpost’ events I recount in these 4 articles could never have happened without, first, my understanding of the dire need to experience directly God’s love firsthand for myself; second, the need to allow Him to heal my false self; and, third, how to start achieving both these things!   

Understanding the Enneagram made everything even more deeply impactful.

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Recap of Part 2

In Part 2, I shared how I had to ‘test the spirits’ in order to be sure that what I had heard from the Lord was indeed from Him; and how I received the confirmation that it was; and the first inklings of peace and joy that this confirmation now returned to my abject, broken heart and spirit.

Part 3 continues my story of the journey through this steep personal crisis.

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Part 3

Second Signpost:
God Speaks to Me about Not Divorcing My Husband

It’s important to listen to God’s voice all the time. But there are special times when it is not just important but critical. Your life or death, and/or that of those dear to you, can hang in the balance.

I learned this truth once again when I toyed with the idea of divorcing my husband. God hates divorce, the scriptures say (Malachi 2:16), and divorce to me, too, was and is anathema. Yet I knew that the unrecognizable, ongoing situation that had developed subsequent to my husband’s departure was taking a very heavy toll on my psychological, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. I concluded that matters had reached a point where remaining in the marriage was neither prudent nor humanly possible.

Naturally, I had discussed my consideration of divorce with my spiritual guide. She strongly suggested that I hold off a while and re-consider the issue very carefully.

I was not so sure.

I did not feel I had the strength to continue any longer being the target of the increasingly fierce heat.

So I did what I always do when faced with life’s ‘grey-area’ decisions: I took time off for a silent retreat spent in the Lord’s holy presence.

I left behind the distractions of my home environment and went to a tiny hermitage for two days in order to listen very closely to the only One who could guide me through this time of ‘crisis within a crisis’.

I knew that only He had the love and wisdom needed to enable me to come to a holy and sound decision regarding the very consequential matter of divorce. 

My 2-Day Retreat Bears Fruit

By the end of my second day of retreat, God spoke to me very clearly. He said I was not to divorce my husband!

The Lord explained that Satan was bent on destroying our family and that divorce on my part would accomplish nothing.

Accordingly, I instructed my lawyer to disregard at once any plans for a possible divorce. Then I wrote immediately to my husband to explain that I had done this, and why.

My husband responded almost immediately. He declared that even if I no longer desired to divorce him, he intended now to divorce me. 

You might say that since divorce was now on the books anyway, the Devil got his way in the end.

I, however, saw the situation very differently.

I knew deep in my soul that I had sought the Lord’s wisdom on whether I should seek a divorce. What my husband chose to do at this point was nothing to do with me. He was his own agent. The fact that God had now allowed my husband, not me, to take the initiative to divorce was strictly between Him and my husband.

I knew the Lord would fully honour my having taken the time to seek His wisdom before making a final decision.

I knew, therefore, beyond any shadow of doubt that, whatever happened now, I was and would remain under His protection. 

This was a very safe place to be. 

I believe that in permitting this development God was allowing me to know exactly where I now stood in the tragic situation that had descended on our family.

This gave me freedom.

I now knew the truth of my situation as the Lord had shown me. And, though highly unpalatable, I knew the truth, God’s truth, had the power to set me free in its own inimitable way.

On looking back on the Lord’s dealings with me over my seven-year ordeal, I can see clearly how deeply He desires to reveal clearly to His children the truth —His truth —regarding the people and situations they face; for only His truth has the power to set us free from the wily deceptions of Satan.

A day or two after my hermitage retreat I received my husband’s letter stating his intention to divorce me. It was quite late in the evening when I finally read it. I remember as though it were yesterday the pain of profound devastation that I experienced on receiving this news —raw, invasive pain, pain that cut through my soul like a drastically sharpened knife-blade.

Yet I also vividly remember how the Lord quickly enveloped me in a blanket of deep peace.

Indeed, I had not known such deep peace since the start of my troubles one year before.

Soon the Lord gave me the specific words with which to respond to my husband’s letter. It was as though He Himself was using the pen in my hand to write them!

I had no doubt that it was my investment of two days spent in the hermitage listening to God’s Voice and seeking His wisdom that paid off this extremely welcome and beneficial dividend of His special gift of peace.

 Inner peace nurtures faith.

I realized that God had now also gifted me with the necessary faith to accept divorce.

I have no doubt whatever that if I had not taken the time to enter deeply into the Lord’s Presence, and in His presence to experience for myself His healing LOVE, I would not have been able to receive His instruction to abort all plans of divorce; and that as a result, I would have got myself into a place where I did not deserve to be and from which it would have been very hard to extricate myself.

I would also have been party to what God says He hates for His children, namely divorce (Malachi 2:16), even though divorce is in some situations necessary and the healthy (and holy) thing to do.

In all these twenty-six years since, I have always been truly and profoundly thankful that I obeyed the Lord.

I Note the Parallel Between my own Situation and that of the Young King David

Several years later, God revealed to me the amazing parallel between my own situation and that of the young King David.

The Lord had anointed David as king in place of the disobedient and devious King Saul. The scriptures tell us that due to Saul’s betrayal of one of his most important vows to God, the Lord had taken away His blessing from Saul. Even worse, the Lord had in fact become Saul’s enemy (1 Samuel 28:16).

In his violent jealousy, Saul now pursued David intending to kill him.

Desperate and terrified for his own life, David believed that the only way out of his dilemma was to seek refuge within the ranks of the enemy of his own people, the Philistines!

David’s dilemma had been very similar to mine and, like mine, had given rise to confusion and fear within his heart. This fear and confusion —two trademarks of the presence of the Devil —had forced David into an action that, had God allowed it, would not have served either David’s own best interests or the Lord’s purposes for David!

Just as He had with me, the Lord saw fit to intervene in David’s plan. He did not allow David to seek refuge with his enemies!

The Lord had known the goodness of David’s heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22). He had understood that David had taken this impulsive decision out of sheer desperation, just as He understood that my thoughts of divorcing my husband had been the result of similar desperation.

The Lord Overrules My Plan for Divorce

Just as the Lord had over-ruled David’s plan to shack up with his avowed enemy, so the Lord had over-ruled my plan to shack up with the devil by divorcing my husband!  

In David’s case, the Lord achieved this by inspiring the Philistines to become suspicious of David’s motives and to refuse to let him remain in their army!

In my case, the Lord over-ruled my consideration of divorce by inspiring me to actively seek His direct presence for two days, so that I would be able to hear Him ‘speak’ clearly and unambiguously to my heart, ‘Do not divorce your husband’.

Thus it was that King David was able to return to defend his own people, the Israelites; which, as God knew well, had been David’s true desire all along as well as God’s own purpose for David’s life!

As with David’s plan, the Lord knew that my thoughts about divorcing my husband did not reflect the true desire of my heart. As He would later reveal to me, He had far better things in mind for my life.

The Lord knows far better than we do the dilemmas posed by our particular life crises and situations. And He knows the tactics Satan resorts to in order to hi-jack God’s purposes for us His children.

He has promised, therefore, to be our Shepherd and to rescue us from the wolves (John 10:1 - 16).

BUT here’s the thing: 

We, the sheep, must take the time needed to listen to the Shepherd’s Voice (John 10:3 - 5). 

This is crucial if we are to receive the outcome the Shepherd desires for us. 

We do this best by entering regularly into His Presence and refraining from words and thoughts while there, so freeing up our hearts of much of the ongoing clutter that weighs them down and gets in the way of what the Lord wants us to know.

By entering into His HEALING, LOVING, presence in silence, you will be able to listen more fully to Him.

You will be able to understand what is His will for YOU as you go through your own crisis. 

Had I taken the matter into my own hands and not made a special effort to seek God’s voice and guidance alone and in silence for 2 days, my victory and resurrection might have been significantly delayed —or might never have arrived at all.