Category: Undaunted

Therefore do not cast away your confidence. Which has great reward. For you have need of endurance. So that after you have done the will of God. You may receive the Promise.

Hebrews 10:35-35

We can definitely say that we live in exceptional times. If ever we needed endurance it is now. This has always been one of my favorite scriptures but it seems to have more meaning today.

I am blessed that my life has not been too disrupted by the stay-at-home order as we are a home education family and it has been great to have my husband working from home. Even living in my little isolated bubble there are times when the outside world shows up and adds frustrations.

I was at a store the other day, the one-way system is just weird. I find that there is this awkward uncomfortable feeling social distance has created. Add in the lack of supplies and then ultimately the lack of helpful associates I could feel my blood start to boil. I was ready to start yelling.

If you spend any time on social media or the news you will end up fit to be tied with the nonsense. You either hear doom and gloom or conspiracy theories. It would be so easy in the noise to ‘cast away our confidence’. Fear is very much knocking on everyone’s door right now.

You have need of Endurance!

Remember undaunted means still determined and enthusiastic, despite problems. Endurance means the ability to withstand hardship of suffering. It would be so easy right now to collapse in a heap and just give up. Just simple tasks like getting enough groceries to cook dinner have become an impossible task.

Any disruption to our lives can play havoc with our mental health. But in all things we are to give thanks and trust God. He has a reason behind this season. I know I need to remember that and this scripture today has been a reminder for the next time my blood starts to boil.

I have need of endurance.

The Promise!

So what is this promise that is mention, well that is what we are going to explore this month. The Good News has always been that Jesus is coming back for His Bride. All that we see now will pass away and a New Heaven and New Earth will be formed. If we can endure this time and all other hard times to come we will find our place at the Wedding Feast Table.

Today marks the end of 2019 and this decade. It’s been an interesting journey and my conclusion at the end of this decade and year is that there will be no more goals.

A Big Dream!

A few years ago I had a BIG DREAM, a vision. In my journey as a home educator, I found a need and I wanted to meet it. I saw it as a ‘calling from God’. I began doing everything and anything to make it happen.

At first, it seemed everything was going wonderfully. Then I thought I had found a team that had ‘caught the vision’ and we were going to do great and mighty things for the Lord. I was literally consumed by it, my entire identity became caught up in it. God was blessing it in ways that I couldn’t believe.

The hurricane

Then a hurricane was heading our way both spiritually and in reality. The first cracks started showing the day I found myself in my bathroom sobbing uncontrollably. I was not able to breathe. So, I just cried out to God to make the noise stop! The pressure was out of control. I was out of control. The noise was out of control!

The hurricane knocked out our power, internet, and cell service for 9 days. The noise stopped. And it was so calm for the first time in a LONG, LONG time! No one could contact me, there were no questions about what to do, no complaints, no opinions. Just silence.

As the power was restored I resolved that the noise would not regain control. Then a week later the phone rang with one of those horrible phone calls you pray you never receive. News so devastating, your heart can’t even begin to process the depth of grief it is facing.

Two weeks later I found myself back in the middle of ‘my dream’ trying to keep going. Yet the world didn’t feel the same. People asked if I was mad at them about something, that I seemed distant. I feel a little sorry for myself, that instead of seeing the depth of the battle going on inside me they saw me pulling back. I was hiding in dark corners of my mind to avoid reality.

Home wanted!

The pressure mounted when finding a new home became a ‘to-do’ item that now had a deadline. It was a good thing but it meant more change. I wasn’t processing stress and change very well at this point.

Maybe if that hadn’t been happening I would have seen that ‘my dream’ was being hijacked. I hadn’t seen that the people that I thought had caught the vision had been quietly melting it down. They were trying to pour it into a different mold, their mold. But there was work to do and no time to think about anything. So I had just soldiered on.

We found the most perfect home, I call it my hug from God because it had little details that only He knew. The realtor had been given a very small want list to work with. It marked a new beginning. A fresh start after a very dark time in our lives.

Opening my eyes

I was finally brave enough to open my eyes when the dark clouds parted and I felt the sun on my face again. What I saw was a disaster. I thought we were on the verge of expanding the dream to reach more people. But what I saw was an organization in trouble, divided leadership, and toxic cliques.

So I tried to form a salvage plan, a way to preserve all the hard work. Maybe if I’d tried sooner. Perhaps friendships could have been saved. I’ve analyzed every misstep, retracing where things shifted. The noise started building again. There was no point in analyzing and asking questions. Like Charles Dickens said in Great Expectations,

The thing was done, whether well or ill done, it was done. And there was no going back.

So as I stood in disbelief at the sight of what once had been a hairline crack but now was a great massive chasm, I heard God whisper. “Do you want Me or do you want this dream?”.

But God, You gave me this dream! You blessed this dream! You opened doors!

“DO YOU WANT ME OR DO YOU WANT THIS DREAM?”

God’s will

Never in my life had my will stood face to face with God’s in such a clear way. In my hands was my kingdom of sand and if I let it go it would crumble into dust. But I had to let it go to take hold of His hand and His will for my life.

So I took a breath, closed my eyes, let the tears that I had been holding back fall and let go. Three minutes was all it took to undo three years of work. But in the middle of the pain and horrible crashing, crushing noises that followed, Jesus’ voice was in the middle saying,

“But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail.”

Luke 22:32

Rebuilding

I’ve spent the last year and a half since that day rebuilding. Rebuilding smarter. Making slower decisions. Someone gave me a card that said: “big dreams start small.” I decided that was what had happened. The dream had been too big too soon. My motto had been, go big or going home and like the foolish man I had built my dream on the sand.

So I started listening to different speakers about doing it scared and setting big goals so big they scare you. I made my lists, my vision boards, my big to-do list and broke it down to smaller ones. And God let me. He had to show me the truth. He had to show me that I was doing it all in my own strength.

I wasn’t ready to face the truth. My dream had been a crutch to deal with the stress of the bad things that had happened in our life. I used my dream to help me face my Daunters. The result was that my dream became a daunter and brought a whole bunch of uninvited guests with it. It deprived me of Christ’s power in my life.

I had got so caught up in trying to prove to the critics and enemies that I was more than capable and God was with me that I forget why I was doing everything in the first place.

The trauma of what we had been through had left me broken. Through that, I had let the wrong people into my life. I don’t think they meant me harm, who knows. I’m not mad at them, even when they continue to attack me years later. In the midst of this God has taught me the most valuable lesson about grace and what it means to truly love. It breaks my heart that the death of ‘my dream’ had such a profound effect on those around it that they have fallen into sin. They have become liars, accusers of the brethren, false witnesses, and slanderers. This was never what I had had in mind in the beginning.

So here I am at the end of this journey, decade, year. You see when God asked me to choose whether I wanted ‘my dream’ or Him and I chose Him, I forgot to do one thing. After I let go of the dream I forgot to take His hand. I stood there frozen and broken. Like a wave, the depression, grief, and every Daunter have overwhelmed me.

Undaunted

I started 2019 with the vision of becoming this Undaunted Woman that I’ve been blogging about all year and by the middle of the year, all I saw was a woman that was beat down to a bloody mess by her Daunters. Dreams can become Daunters too!

And that when it happened. Then I finally realized something! I don’t need a big dream, a massive goal, an inspiring vision. I just need to be in the center of God’s will!

No more goals!

You see this whole time I forgot to take God’s hand and let Him lead me out of this into His will. It’s a hard lesson to learn but it’s the place where He can actually start doing what He wants to do with us.

I read Phil Vischer’s autobiography “Me, myself and Bob” purely by accident, or so I thought. It was a God-appointed moment. You see what happened to his company Big Ideas was very similar to what I had been through with my organization. As I was reading it aloud to my boys as part of an education project I was fighting to not cry.

He talked about noise and vision and all the things that I had said. Someone was articulating what I had been through with words I hadn’t been able to find. Then God started to speak through his words.

The impact God has planned for us doesn’t occur when we’re pursuing impact. It occurs when we’re pursing God. In 2003, my dream died. And I discovered, once all the noise had faded away, what I had been missing all along. “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1)

Phil Vischer

So now I’m setting down the goals, the dreams, the visions, the noise. Getting distracted in the whole situation I lost sight of God and what His will for me is.

This year there will be no 20 things to do in 20, no word for the year, no goals, no visions. All I want from this moment on is GOD’S WILL! I’m so thankful God is patient. He has stood in the sidelines while I have spun my wheels, worked myself to death, and built my sandcastles. He stood there waiting patiently for me to come to the end of me and my work.

Like the song “There was another in the fire” says,

And when I look at the space between where I used to be & this reckoning. I know I will never be alone. There was another in the fire, standing next to me.

Will I always succeed in being in the center of God’s will? Probably not. I will have to choose every day to die to my will. But I’m finally seeing that it’s His power at work in me, not mine. If anything good comes from my life it will all be God’s handiwork and not mine.

So I’m taking God’s hand and walking forward to His will. And who knows what lies ahead!

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Chirst Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen!

Ephesians 3:20-21

For you were called to freedom; only do not let your freedom become an opportunity for the sinful nature, worldliness, selfishness, but through love serve and seek the best for one another.

Galatians 5:13

As we celebrate freedom here in the United States today, I thought this was the perfect scripture for our Build Up Challenge.

We have been ‘called to freedom’, out of captivity and away from a daunted life. Undaunted freedom is ultimately the goal of our lives, where we walk in complete trust of God and not at the captivity of Daunters that lie, deceive and stop us from being all God has called us to be.

The story of being an Undaunted Woman doesn’t stop at our freedom from our Daunters. In fact, it is just the beginning of the process. Our freedom is to not just about us.

Freedom creates opportunity. We have the choice as to what we will fill that void with. Will we make this about ourselves? Will we focus on our lives, desires, hopes, needs and adopt the mindset of the modern ‘selfie’ world we live in. Or will we put on the ‘new man’ and let the void be filled with love? Firstly with the love of God but secondly with the love for others.

“Seek the best for one another”! What would the world look like if we did this every day? If instead of letting the worldliness of envy, jealousy, rivalry, and self dictate our interactions we let love for each other help us to seek the best for one another. Maybe we could all take a huge collective sigh and breathe again. Maybe we could instantly eliminate the vast majority of the Daunters we face each day. Maybe we would make it much harder for the enemy to find a breeding ground for division and strife.

Praying for those that spitefully use us is not easy but there is freedom in it and may even be the key that releases you from the captivity of the Daunters that belong to the house of worldliness.

So today think of a woman that you have had the hardest time wishing the best for and then pray for her. Not that prayer!!! The prayer where you ask God to bless her and help her to be the woman that God has called her to be!

Strength & dignity are her clothing & her position is strong & secure; she rejoices over the future, the latter day or time to come, knowing that she & her family are in readiness for it!

Proverbs 31:25

Ok so don’t throw stuff at me for mentioning the Proverbs 31 woman. I know she has set an impossible standard for us and she terrifies some people.

So many times, we think being prepared for the future means financial security or resources or grand thing that will take the fear away. But I really don’t think that is why she rejoiced. The financial meltdowns over the last decade have shown that even the nicest retirement fund can disappear in a moment. A natural disaster can destroy a home and belongings. A death or sickness can alter the future forever.

So, what is the readiness this talks about? Strength. That strength that only comes from the Lord. Leaders like Gideon were given strength for battles that didn’t make sense. We always hear about strength in numbers, but God told him to send away the vast majority of his army and only go into battle with 300 men. The Israelites were told to march around Jericho’s walls and blow trumpets not create weaponry to bring them down. God’s strength is not what we think strength is.

Having the kind of strength that can rejoice in the future no matter what it holds is the strength with which Paul said “For to me, to live is Christ, He is my source of joy, my reason to live, and to die is gain, for I will be with Him in eternity.” Philippians 1:21.

If our lives are lived for Christ, then we can rejoice in the future because it will either be more opportunities to glorify His name here on earth or it will be with Him in eternity. Will you sing a Hallelujah for a future that is in Christ’s hands?

Let the high praises of God be in their throats and a two-edged sword in their hands.

Psalm 149:6

This is a battlefield prayer. In fact, the whole Psalm is about worship.

2 Corinthians 10:3-4 talks about how the weapons of our warfare are not carnal or human but they are “mighty before God”. There is nothing mightier that high praise.

We are not talking about some little Sunday service Baptist hymnal praise here, oh no!!! This is the praise that is an exaltation. It’s lifting praise to God higher than anything else in your world. It’s praising Him above your trials, above your storm, above your bad mood. It’s putting Him in the utmost place in your life and declaring Him King. It’s the true sense of proclaiming a hallelujah. The sound is coming from deep in their throats.

Let’s also be clear this verse is NOT talking about the church choir either. This verse is talking about the fully armed warriors for the Kingdom. They don’t have any wimpy little sword or bow in their hand, they have a two-edged sword. This sword will get you every way you swing it.

Do you see the images coming together, a warrior with a mighty sword in their hand exalting and worshipping God? THIS IS OUR WARFARE!

If God inhabits the praises of His people, then it would only make sense that is where we will find His strength in us. Jericho fell not because of cannons or ramparts but because of faithful praise and there are so many other examples in the Bible of sending the choir onto the battlefield first.

When we truly worship God, we are no longer afraid of a two-edged sword or what it will do. We will let the worship and Word of God penetrate our hearts and cut away the Daunters and their hold on us. We are no longer afraid because our focus has shifted to Him and His glory, not our lives and definitely not our Daunters.

Can you pick up your sword and from deep down inside raise a Hallelujah as high as you can?

And behold, a leper came up to Him and, prostrating himself, worshiped Him, saying, Lord if You are willing. You are able to cleanse me by curing me. And He reached out His hand and touched him, saying I am willing; be cleansed by being cured. And instantly his leprosy was cured and cleansed. And Jesus said to him. See that you tell nothing about this to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and present the offering that Moses commanded, for a testimony to your healing and as evidence to the people.

Matthew 8:2-4

What a beautiful testimony of worship, healing and restoration. Leprosy was as a horrific disease in Biblical times. Leprosy affects the skin and peripheral nerves. It creates these unattractive sores on the skin but probably the worse part is the nerve damage that can lead to loss of feeling in arms and legs and muscle weakness.

As I was reading about leprosy, it really did speak to me about some Daunters. You see leprosy is a slow growing bacterium. It usually take 3 – 5 years for symptoms to appear so finding the source of the infection can be near impossible after that length of incubation.

Some of us are spiritual and emotional lepers, walking around. Somewhere in our past we came into contact with the bacteria. Now, this is not just casual contact, it’s usually prolonged exposure. Something happened, a tragedy, an abuse, a hurt, a place we got stuck with an infected Daunter. We got out of the situation, but we were carrying around the bacteria, slowly growing and developing.

Then a sore would appear but we wouldn’t pay attention. Our nerves would start to show signs of damage. Our spiritual muscles got weaker, the spiritual nerves in our eyes were damaged so we start having vision problems. As the sores continued to appear, the moments we snap at people or take our frustrations out on others, or the other manifestations in our relationships, meant people didn’t want to or couldn’t be around us anymore. So now we are secluded, hiding away with our leprosy.

But we need to be like the leper in Matthew 8. He had heard about the healing miracles Jesus was doing. He KNEW that if Jesus cured him he would be cleansed and could return to normal life.

His prayer started with WORSHIP! He threw himself prostrate, the highest form of worship he could do, before Jesus, asking for healing. He knew something many of us forget when we pray, “IF YOU ARE WILLING”, God’s will. I do believe that if Jesus had said “No, it’s not my will” the leper would have accepted it because he understands something about God’s sovereignty and will.,

You can read about the offering he had to make at the temple to be cleansed, it’s a beautiful process, in Leviticus 14. If was a blood offering and he had to be sprinkled with the blood.

Hebrews 9:13-14 explains how much more the power of the blood of Christ has, to cleanse us. “For if the mere sprinkling of unholy and defiled persons with blood of goats & bulls & with the ashes of a burnt heifer is sufficient for the purification of the body, how much more surely shall the blood of Christ, Who by virtue of His eternal Spirit has offered Himself as an unblemished sacrifice to God, purify our consciences from dead works and lifeless observations to serve the ever living God?”

Our Daunters are dead works and lifeless observations that are hindering our service to God. Can we sing a Hallelujah and lay ourselves down prostrate in true worship to God and let Him cleanse us by curing the leprosy a Daunter left behind? If He is willing to cleanse you, are you willing to ask?