My spirit was alive and active. A part of me that had been dead was now resurrected by Holy Spirit. He revealed God as a good Father and what it was like to have Jesus as my King. I began to see what it was like to function in the Kingdom of Heaven while being present on earth. It was exhilarating. I felt alive, not because I was awakening to all these spiritual realities but because I finally felt like I was home and Holy Spirit was establishing me in that home. That didn’t mean that all of the life that I had lived didn’t have consequences on my soul. My emotions, my will, and my mind needed to be touched by God as well.
If there is anything that I’ve experienced about God it’s that He is a creative genius. He doesn’t only know how to use the eraser; He is very good at taking something old and creating something entirely new out of it. He knows full well that every little ding and dent in the clay is just an opportunity to smooth something entirely new into the creation’s functionality and personality. Ultimately, we are fashioned to be overcomers. Rooted in victory, our only outcome is to thrive! Right now, in this very moment, all of us have an opportunity sitting before us. We all have something in our life, some life area that needs overcoming—that needs Holy Spirit to cast a vision so we can see how to walk through it victoriously in wisdom and in power. It’s going to require not only spiritual wisdom, but it will also require your heart to be open to whatever it needs so that you can occupy the victory that Christ has made way in advance for you.
I think for a long time I thought walking with God was about accomplishing something, and that’s the thing about embracing a prophetic lifestyle. You get glimpses of your future, of the things you and God can do together, and you think it’s about doing those things, but that’s not it. God’s not showing you a task list; He’s giving you glimpses of what you look like in union with Him. He’s not giving you images of how you will be behaving if you want to please Him. He’s showing you how pleased He is with you and what you can do if you rest in that wealthy place of God’s pleasure. Holy Spirit is in the great work of healing your heart so that when you begin to see Heaven on earth you will create; it’s from a place of being, not doing. It’s from a place of joy, not striving.
God’s perfect love is in the process of casting out everything that opposes our reality found in Christ. What remains once fear is gone? Vision of a life that is overcoming anything that doesn’t align with Heaven’s best for our lives.
God has used angels, prophetic visions, words of knowledge and wisdom so that I would know Him and others would experience being known by Him. It’s been inside of this love connection that Holy Spirit has been maturing me. It’s been a long road of mistakes—embarrassing ones at that—which have shown me that it’s never been about maturing in the gifts; it’s about Holy Spirit using the gifts to mature me in His infinite love. It’s through the gifts that I’ve learned how I can only honor this natural body and world that He’s placed me in by embracing the supernatural. I’ve not just been learning how spiritual gifts work; I’ve been learning how He, God, moves and thinks and operates. Though He is mysterious in His ways at times, it’s no mystery that I’m called to know and be known by Him (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
Once I began to have prophetic experiences with God, I started to understand these experiences like currency. God was putting money in my spiritual bank account so that I could spend Heaven on earth. These encounters had tangible, practical applications that were leading me into incredible things that I never thought were possible for my life. I used my journal like a bank account. Everything that began to happen to me—every time I even wondered if God was speaking to me, highlighting some thing or person to me—I journaled it down. I was becoming a wealthy woman, so to speak, and it gave me a boldness to approach people, to step into things that I felt fear in doing but did anyway because I knew God was with me. Journaling down every experience, every encounter helped me discern what God was revealing to me about Himself, and it was healing my soul. The areas of life where I felt abandoned and not protected were not consuming my thoughts as much. I felt freer and lighter because I was learning how to possess this spiritual currency—the prophetic—and spend it, resulting in favor in my life. Simply put, I was, for the first time, walking in belief, and my faith for the impossible became my normal.
In my studies during college, I remember watching a teaching by Rick Lavoie. It was called “When the Chips Are Down.” He asked the audience to think of a child’s self-esteem like poker chips. Each child has a number of poker chips that is increased by good things happening to the child or decreased when bad things happen. Whether they want to play in the game or not is moot; everyone has to play in this game called life. Rick challenged the audience by asking them what they thought happened when a child who has a low number of chips (self-esteem) is asked to play with a kid who has an endless number of chips; how would he play the game? There are two likely outcomes for the child with few poker chips.
1. The child who has the lower self-esteem can’t afford to take necessary risks because of fear of losing what little he has, so he clings to it, guards it, defends it, and ultimately never gains. All he does is focus on the little he has; he never takes risks to grow his potential and never gains more chips out of fear of loss and disappointment.
2. The child who has the lower self-esteem hopelessly, recklessly throws it all away. He goes all in with no wisdom or self-control. Lack of vision of the potential he’s holding will ultimately lead him to losing it all, quickly.
Whether we like it or not, we are a part of this game called life. Some of us wake up every day crying out to God that we don’t want to play, that we don’t have enough chips to play in the game. We’ve played the part of the beggar and the pleader, seeking out those we think may throw a few more chips our way—not that we’d know how to play any better even if we had more of a fair playing ground.
I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I’m not saying things will always be fair. I am saying that you’ve been prophetically empowered to change the game instead of being a victim of the game. You may have been playing by rules that God never gave you. Matthew 6:33 says it better than me: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” The Kingdom is your origin point. You are seated with Christ in heavenly places. His righteousness is your perspective. Focus on the things above, and God will show you how to become the expert player in your own life!
Some of you are being called into the impossible things. Honestly, it’s all of us, but some of you are actually awakened to it. God is with you. He will provide what you need, but you will have to learn how to navigate the conflict of your soul pulling you back into the past and the hope of glory calling you into the future. You cannot avoid the tension that comes with walking with God; you simply learn how to walk with and like Him. We do this by spending time in His presence. In His presence you will begin to see and hear things, and from that place a prophetic language is developed within you—this is the language that moves mountains.
For me it looked like this—my husband found me still in my towel from my morning shower, ten hours after he had left me earlier that morning. It was now early evening and I hadn’t moved. Not one inch. I was panicked on the inside, but on the outside I couldn’t force one tear. My emotions and my body were not in unity. It felt like I was going to die in this skin shell, but I wanted to live first. Where was the God who was whispering me jokes so that I could have a laugh when life seemed to be a little too serious? I needed a joke. I needed Him. I had been crying out to Him for over a month, but nothing—nada, crickets—and the silence had finally caught up to me.
By the way, sometimes God’s so-called silence is His way of working out some really bad theology (beliefs about who He is). It’s not Him withdrawing love or affection or changing His mind about who you are; it’s Him not agreeing with what you’re attempting to pin on Him. I’m just being transparent here, and we’ve all done this. We believe we heard from on high and then blame a bunch of stuff on God that in reality we either incorrectly interpreted or placed too many of our own expectations on the word while simultaneously releasing all responsibility of working out the word by “waiting on God.” God is not sending sickness to teach you lessons. He’s not trying to torment you so you can relate to His Son’s experience. Life is real and each choice has consequences, good or bad. God will send angelic intervention to help you overcome these choices, but ultimately God is maturing His Bride into a people who don’t avoid discipline and don’t shy away from hard things but with a sound mind can make choices from a place of power and love.
Ben found me in crisis. From the beginning of my seeking out Holy Spirit, I would say the supernatural, at this point in my journey, had become my normal, and that seemed to be easing up as soon as I began to do the things I had seen in the vision I had in the classroom that day. It wasn’t just a lack of feeling God’s presence that I was experiencing—it was not seeing the angelic or getting prophetic insight for the people around me. I felt spiritually dry and thirsty.
I grasped for scriptures that had been stored in my heart, hoping for them to illuminate my path out of this pit, but they were tainted with a doubting voice that had a sarcastic spin. And you know that cheesy saying, “My prayers were hitting the ceiling”? I had never experienced that before, but this dark cloud hanging over me was doing just that, absorbing my words and raining them back down over me, mocking me. My hope had been stolen. My heart had grown sick.
I saw for myself how good God was and heard the plans He had for me; my journal was overflowing with spiritual currency, so to speak. The problem was I didn’t know how to steward these words outside of supernatural encounters and experiencing His tangible presence. When it all stopped, I took it to mean God stopped moving. So I stopped moving and then I felt abandoned, but it wasn’t actually that clear going through it. I started doing what a lot of us do outside of big encounters and angelic visitations—I began to over-complicate and hyper-spiritualize everything.
Before I knew it, the prophetic words I received from God were being eroded with doubt. What was just months ago so simple and clear for me was now in question! What if all the things I was seeing and hearing were delusions of grandeur? What if I was delusional, or worse yet had some type of mental illness? What if I mess up the wonderful things God has for me by making a wrong choice? Did I do something wrong?
I didn’t move unless I felt a twinge of Holy Spirit. This meant I didn’t write unless I felt a spiritual inclination for me to write. I put the pen down if I felt that spiritual presence leave. I began to develop superstitious rituals that I thought would please God enough to bring Him back so that I could continue to work on the vision He had given me. It all felt so holy. It was actually my own religion that I had developed and didn’t know it. God now seemed imbalanced to me. It wasn’t God. It was me. In the craze of my doing, I never stopped to reflect that this was not at all how God was when I was physically encountering His presence, so I was unable to recognize that in all of my doing I had stopped being. I was performing.
This is where I feel a lot of people are—stuck in the “I only do what God tells me to and when God tells me to do it.” This is not a sound mindset and is not from God. If you’re doing that, stop it! It led me to reverting back to the person who never really knew God in the first place. I began to doubt if God would really come through, and I began to mentally break down. I would release all my responsibilities and “wait on God,” dismissing that God is always in the business of empowering me to exercise self-control (self-control means to control one’s self) from the place of wholeness in Him. I spiraled into an extreme depression that went on for months. When Ben came home that day, I was at my rock bottom!
I heard Ben walk down the hallway and enter our bedroom. In a paralyzed state, I never budged. I don’t know if I am a good enough writer to explain to you what it is like to experience hopelessness, though I truly believe people, even believers, are living in varying degrees of it daily. Some of you reading this now are probably connecting and know exactly what I am talking about.
So here I was, lying on my bed with my husband standing over me. In silence he stood staring, but his face was screaming his heartbreak. He eventually sat down on the bed beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. Ben’s touch signaled to my heart that everything was okay, I had just forgotten. Ben’s presence brought me a sense of peace—that is, until I heard Holy Spirit say to me in that moment, “Ben, has a word for you.” My peace was replaced with anxiety because I knew Ben, at that time, struggled with the idea that God was involved with humanity intimately. He trusted what I had been experiencing was real because he knew me, but I think he believed God reserved those kinds of experiences for only certain people (this is not true, by the way).
I looked at him and told him that God had given him something to share with me. Wide-eyed, he stuttered, “What? No. I don’t have anything. What…?” and then he blurted out, “Rosh Hashanah.”
Perfect, I thought to myself. I need English right now, not Hebrew. “I don’t know what that means, Ben.”
He began to describe to me how Rosh Hashanah was the celebration of the new year. Information came rolling out of his mouth as if he had written an encyclopedia article on it. God was giving him insight into this Jewish holiday. And as he began to prophesy over me that it was a new year, it was a new season for me, his eyes widened and they filled with tears. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but he was seeing something within me. I sat up on the bed because I could visibly tell that something was happening with Ben.
“Ben? Are you okay?” He sat there staring at me and then began to reach his hand toward my face. I scooted away from him a bit to try and make sense of what was happening.
“Betsy, you have a veil covering your face, and Holy Spirit is telling me to lift the veil.”
“What?” I saw nothing but understood that Ben was encountering God in a very powerful way and seeing spiritually. Tears streamed down his face. As he reached out toward me, he motioned as if he was lifting a veil away from my face—then he began crying and laughing. He put his hands over his mouth and whispered in awe through his hands, “Betsy, you are so beautiful. Oh, Betsy, you are so beautiful! You face is shining so brightly and your hair looks as if it is made out of pure gold.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, a memory came flooding back to me of me when I was four or five years old. I had gotten out of my bed to go to the bathroom to get a drink of water. In our bathroom, my mom had placed a little stool by the sink, and I would go in there and put my mouth under the faucet to catch a drink. This particular night, I walked into the bathroom and got a drink of water, but when I stood upright while shutting off the water, my reflection in the mirror was outshining the bathroom lights and beamed back at me. My face was radiating a bright white light and my hair looked like long strands of gold. The only way I could describe that moment was that I knew God and I knew that I was His child. The moment impacted me so much that I remember thinking my dirty blonde hair was actually made of pure gold. That moment made such an impression on my little heart that I actually believed my hair was made out of gold for several years.
Now Ben and I were both standing to our feet. Ben began to declare over me that I was a new creation, in a new season, that this was a holy new year for me, and I was about to enter into a life I had never experienced before with God. Talk about power! That familiar presence of what felt like holy fire covered my body. That was the day that my marriage permanently changed. Remember what I said earlier about God using the prophetic to reconcile us wholly unto Him (spirit, soul, and body)? It applies not only to an individual but to the relationships you have with others as well! This very power that reconciles relationships is the same power that God used to change the world through Jesus. Supernatural reconciliation, demonstrated by Jesus and empowered by Holy Spirit in our everyday relationships, is the only true calling we have. My husband saw me in a brand-new light after that night. Once you get a glimpse of someone the way God sees them, it’s impossible to see them in any other light. Once you know how they are known to God, any behavior that contradicts the truth of who they are is easy to recognize, making it easy to not judge them but love them by reminding them of who it is they’ve forgotten they are. This is amazing grace in action! This is how God’s perfect love casts out fear and covers a multitude of sins!
God revealed to Ben my origin story with Him—a story that life had stolen away. God was not only exposing me to Ben in the light of His glory—a supernatural act that unified us as a couple in a way that therapy and counseling never could accomplish—but He was reminding me that I needed to go back to the beginning, back to my beginning with God. Back to when He chose me long before I ever began to strive for His attention or believe I had to perform for His affections.
He chose me first, and that wasn’t changing. What was so brilliant about this well-timed move of God was that after that experience as a little girl in my bathroom, I specifically remember telling my mother the next morning that my hair was actually made of pure gold and about my encounter with God. I had a witness! So, after Ben reminded me of my origin story with God, I called up my mom and asked her about “the girl with the golden hair.” Not only did she remember it, but she remembered me actively engaging angels and talking to God from the time I was very young. The innocence and ease of my relationship with my Maker came rushing back to me as she recalled stories of observing me as a child. We cried and laughed together on the phone because she too remembered experiencing very similar moments with God and angels when she was very young. Recalling the stories of your relationship with God always brings us right into worship—your weapon against anxiety and depression.
You’ve got to start seeing yourself the way God sees you—free, empowered with self-control, and incredibly wealthy with His wisdom and ways. It’s important that we remain in that truth regardless of encounters and supernatural happenings. The truth is God is present whether you feel it or not. This is our reality as partakers in this new covenant. A huge part of learning to walk with God in spirit is learning how to walk with Him in truth. The truth is you’ve been anointed to hear God’s voice and to abide in His presence. In Exodus 33:14-17, Moses was right to say to God that he would not go without God’s physical presence, for how else would he know if he had favor with God? However, we are in a different covenant with God. We are in a covenant in which His presence has been poured out! It’s beyond our feeling, our seeing, and our doing; it’s simply our reality. A big reason I fell into such a depression was because as Holy Spirit was awakening me I began to encounter God’s tangible presence nonstop. The things that were unseen I could see. The supernatural unfolded all around me, and as soon as that seemed to ease up I was too afraid to move. I thought God was gone. So I panicked and begged and all over again forgot. Jesus revealed a different picture of walking with God than Moses did.
Luke 4:1-2 says, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.”
Jesus wasn’t externally looking for signs and wonders filled with Holy Spirit; He became the sign and wonder. It doesn’t say that Holy Spirit left Jesus when He entered the wilderness; it says that Jesus was full of Holy Spirit! Instead of looking externally for signs of favor, Jesus demonstrated what it looks like to grow in favor with God. Yes, Jesus grew up in favor with God and with man (see Luke 2:52). Jesus didn’t run about seeking prophetic affirmation from those around him. He lifted His eyes to His Father and in that place was affirmed. When Jesus was being tempted by the devil, He battled from His posture of knowing and being known. When the devil tested whether He knew who He was, Jesus was found knowing.
My point in saying all this is—we must be awakened to the truth that God’s spirit is dwelling within us. Jesus made sure of that! We can now walk in a confidence and a peace that surpasses our own understanding because Holy Spirit is renewing our mind constantly to His understanding. You won’t always have a supernatural encounter or experience to affirm the favor that is already on your life, and that’s by design. I’m not saying that His external presence ceases and we don’t have any more tangible experiences of God’s presence and it just becomes a knowing thing. I’m saying at some point God wants your faith to be rooted in Him. He does not want you drawing your identity from spiritual gifting or only supernatural abilities. Those are good and need to be honored, but your identity is found knowing you are His and He is yours. Luke 10:19-21 says it better than I:
“I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.”
Because you are filled with Holy Spirit, you will become a sign and wonder, revealing who your Father is—revealing the glory that has been placed on you. But if all of those encounters and all the signs and all the wonders ceased (they won’t), you will be found full of joy because at the end of the day it’s always been about you being God’s child. It’s as simple as that.
After Ben encountered how I was known to God and he reminded me of my origin story with God, I began the journey of learning how to lay down the chase of Holy Spirit and simply be indwelled by Him. It was no longer my feelings indicating if God was present; it was me acknowledging that He always was, always has been, and always will be beyond anything I felt. I could feel my proverbial spine strengthening and a boldness to take on my life living with God’s eternal Yes and Amen over my life, trusting I’d be able to recognize the voice of God if plans changed.
Holy Spirit is giving you glimpses of incredible things, and with an awakened prophetic voice you will look at the impossibilities, at your limitations—and believe me, you have limitations—and you will say aloud, “Not today, you impossible thing! Stand aside!” The mountain certainly doesn’t know it yet, but it’s moving with each step you take toward it. Why? Because you’ve been called to overcome the very thing that’s blocking your view, that’s obstructing your path. Because you are filled with Holy Spirit. God’s justice won’t be had when we allow impossibilities to dictate what’s true instead of us proclaiming what’s true to the impossibilities!
God is balancing the scales of justice in this hour, but it’s inside of impossibilities. Your soul is longing for the impossible. Your soul is aching for something new! It’s the cry of the new creation within you that’s longing to be acknowledged and lived out. But you will have to declare for it to rise up!
Proverbs 13:4 says: “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the soul of the diligent is made fat” (NASB).
Essentially, this is saying your soul is going to crave, it’s going to desire, but if you’re not managing it you’ll reap nothing. You are a being who was created with emotions. You were created to allow those emotions to give you information, not dictate what’s true. Not acknowledging your emotions only leads to you being managed by them, and allowing your emotions to be the captain of your ship leads to constant offense and being misinformed.
The health of your soul is vital to you walking in victory or walking like a victim. Holy Spirit is indwelling us so that our soul sings out it is well! When our spirit, soul, and body are in alignment, everything around us experiences God’s justice because what remains is His righteousness.
You were designed to hope, to have dreams, and to desire more. But someone whose hopes have been deferred because their soul is ignored and unmanaged will not only find themselves heartsick—depressed and anxious—they will embrace the dying process and check out of this gift that is life. Hope deferred may make you heartsick, but longings fulfilled—hopes of the heart (your soul)—are a tree of life!
Your soul was designed to inform you of the happenings of your heart. It’s your diagnostic center that something needs to be managed. Of course, it doesn’t have the final say in the matter, but it’s the alert that something within your heart needs to be looked at and filtered through the mind of Christ. As we take on the mind of Christ, we not only become powerful and manage our hearts in a controlled manner filtered through wisdom, we begin to reap the fruit that’s being grown on this tree of life that we are taking from. Our soul grows fat and our heart is happy because we begin to self-manage and partner with God in this thing called life!
Don’t take it from me; take it from God—you were created to have a fat and happy soul! But that’s because you’re overcoming—you’re walking through hard things, having the hard conversations in order to bring healing to your relationships and not ignoring or avoiding life. You’re seeing obstacles and thinking opportunities. You are empowered because instead of just seeing things naturally, you see things spiritually. You no longer partner with performance and no longer believe the lie that you can mess this up. You’re getting all kinds of intel now from your whole being as well as Holy Spirit. You’re checking in on your emotions, on your gut instincts, reminding yourself what it is that God has said to you and about you. You even ask for new vision, and then you use self-control. You self-manage and you make choices like a free person would—powerfully informed, richly able to take the risk.
This is where awakening your own prophetic voice and nature is vital! I’ve noticed once people begin to walk and talk with God, they get prophetic visions and words about their potential and purpose; they go through a struggle very similar to what I went through. The prophetic taps into the eternity that is housed within us. It taps into the bigness and vastness that is God, and it can be overwhelming.
In our immaturity and lack of self-awareness of what is going on with our hearts, we can get very lost in chasing something we already have. There is a tension between the present and the future that must be embraced to live out the miracle that is your life. We must learn to not be so fearful of disappointment, loss, and lack and realize those things are simply reminders of what you’re longing for in the first place. I don’t become disappointed about things unfulfilled in my life unless I’ve desired them first. This means when I become self-aware that I’m focused on lack, afraid to be disappointed, or living in my loss, then all I need to do is recognize what it’s pointing to! I go back to my origin and remember my promises and say to the loss, “You may be my present, but you are not my future.” I laugh at the disappointment and I say, “Oh, thank you for reminding me what it is I’m passionate about and longing for.” I look at my lack and I say aloud, “You’ve never been nor ever will be my portion!” This isn’t good-vibing yourself into joy; it’s acknowledging what is going on in your heart and not hiding from it but reminding yourself that though fear, disappointment, lack, and loss may be present, they aren’t your future because you are an overcomer with the mind to do something about it. You’ve been anointed to overcome!
After that day when I was reminded about my origin with God, anytime I sat at my computer to begin writing—in full agreement with God that authoring and coaching/pastoring was what I would be about—anxiety would promptly show up asking me who I thought I was, pretending I was a writer who had something to say. But then I’d remember my origin story. I would remember that Jesus’ yoke is easy and His burden is light. My work wasn’t about accomplishing something, so I would never feel lack; it was about achieving because He has achieved and I’m seated in heavenly places with Him! So, I’d say to the anxiety, out loud (proclamation is your victory song), “I am a writer! I believe, so I shall speak!” And the more I did that the less I became afraid of losing something that I could never lose—my voice. I no longer feared being silenced. This is a practice I do in every life area.
God’s favor is the light in which you should see yourself. You’re revealed in this light so that you can see exactly who it is you are becoming. Receiving this act of kindness requires faith, because when He reveals who you are in that glorious light, you’ll be doing things that are beyond your understanding. No question—it’s beyond your understanding because it’s His mind that you’re sharing in. But always remember it’s because you are loved, not so you can be loved, that He shares with you His glory.
It’s very important that you embrace your humanness—the very thing that God calls good and loves—and live from that place. Avoid compartmentalizing and segregating yourself, thinking He only sees one piece of you and loves only that piece. God is reconciling you wholly back to Him. He wants every piece of you and loves all of your pieces. He’s not worried about your brokenness; in fact, it’s why He loves you and shares His righteousness with you. It’s when you become okay with who you are presently and believe in faith that He’s truly the author and perfecter of your faith that you begin to rest and discover yourself alongside Him. Your life becomes a joy and you become a joy to those around you.
This is why your testimony is not simply about where you’ve been; it’s also very much about where you are going! God is making crooked paths straight all right, but are you noticing where it’s leading you? Have you caught glimpses of your future and possessed the wisdom to align your present to get there? It’s hard for us to do that when we don’t know ourselves the way God knows us. And if you’re like me, once I began seeing the potential of who I could become through God’s eyes, I was ready to run full steam ahead, not realizing His purpose wasn’t about a grand destination; rather, it was about our relationship growing and developing into its full potential.