But everything exposed to the light is revealed clearly for what it is since anything reveled is a light. This is why it says, “Get up, sleeper! Arise from the dead and the Messiah will shine on you!”
Ephesians 5:13-14
2021 has been quite a year. When I look back over it, all I can see is the hand of Adonai working in our lives despite all the different circumstances that we’ve endured. At the beginning of this year, I had my Ephesians 5:13-14 moment. It began the moment I picked up the book The Paradigm by Johnathan Cahn. That was when the revealing began, and I started seeing the things of Adonai in a way that I never had before. I then read his book, The Oracle and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. When I reached the chapter “The Dark Jubilee”, upon its completion, I slammed the book shut and threw it across the bed. It became so clear that we are truly living in the end of days and that the return of Yeshua could happen at any time, that we are a breath away from seeing Him split that eastern sky.
From this I got the idea, which I know wasn’t my own, to begin blog breaking down the song He Is by Aaron Jeoffrey. It began simplistically enough with the first post, but I found myself hungering to find out more about the Word from the Hebrew perspective and began researching as much as I could. As I went deeper, my understanding did as well, and so did the writing.
I remember pulling up praise and worship music and songs that I love on Spotify and listening to them and going into prayer. As I was on my knees, He Is by began to play. Tears began to stream down my cheeks and by the time the song got to the book of Isaiah, I was on my face, on the floor sobbing. For the first time I was having an encounter with Him through each line of the song. As I was studying who He is in each line, He has become more real to me in that way. It was like seeing who Yeshua was for the first time in my life. He had become really real. A hunger rose up, one I had never experienced, and I couldn’t wait to get into the Word, to start digging into the Hebrew words and seeing things from their cultural perspective as well as scriptural. I felt like I was starving and could not get satisfied. I didn’t know that would happen once I reached the end of the song, but then I started seeing, reading, and hearing things on The Feast of Sukkot, Tabernacles. It was everywhere, and I knew that once the He Is collection was complete that would be the next subject matter of writing. This again made me dig deeper into our Hebrew roots. Soon after, the Praise collection would be birthed and that’s when everything in our lives changed.
Just before Passover, we discovered The Chosen and The Chosen Unveiled with Rabbi Jason Sobel and we were hooked from the get-go. We were excited to know that Season 2 was about to be released episode at a time as they were completed. I was amazed at the different ways I honestly connected, and still do, with the characters in different situations. When they released Episode 2, they surprised everyone and shared Episode 3 as well. That episode broke me. At its completion I sat with my mouth hanging open, my hands over my mouth, and silently cried. I tear up just thinking about that episode for multiple reasons, one of them knowing that mom feeling of not being needed by your children anymore once they’re grown. Your children are your greatest joy and yet your greatest pain can come from them or something surrounding them. The realness of what The Chosen does is what makes their story telling so great.
At the beginning of June, I started the Praise collection at that was when the first strike hit. Oklahoma summers can be pretty brutal, and we had been experiencing scorching heat and hadn’t seen rain in who knows how long. It was then our AC went on the fritz. All of the techs were backlogged with calls and told us it would be the end of the week before they could even come and check it out. It was one of the first times I remember not getting shaken by the situation and just prayed about it. That was when the miracle happened. The heavens opened up and it began to rain, and the cool front that came through lasted for the whole week, not just the few days originally forecasted. We had our windows open and fans running, and it stayed comfortable in the house. The day they came and fixed our AC was the day the cold front pushed through, and the temps started going back up. It made me think of the woman in 2 Kings 4 whose children were to be sold as slaves due to a debt she owed, and Elisha told her to borrow as many containers as she could and to pour what little oil she had into them. The oil flowed until she had no containers left. He multiplied the days of the cold front to meet our needs just as He did the oil for that woman.
July found us facing our greatest trial. As I was writing a multi-post called “The Battle is Adonai’s”, my mother was hit physically. I had begun praying the moment I got the phone call, and the verses that I was writing on at the time flew to my mind. “If calamity strikes us, such as war, judgement, disease or famine, we will stand before this house – that is, before you, since your name is in this house – and cry to you in our distress; and you will hear us and rescue us.” 2 Chronicles 20:9 That scripture became my banner. She went down on a Friday and when we got her to the hospital the following Tuesday, we found out how bad the situation really was. It is beyond terrifying to be told that they have found blood on your mother’s brain. Yet while she was in the ER before she was flown to Oklahoma City, she kept telling the nurses that “God wasn’t done with her yet”, and it is documented in her medical records. While in ICU, she was taken for an arteriogram, and that was when I faced my own personal battle, one that I wrote about in a post entitled Even If. I can honestly say that this was the first time that I had ever physically felt the spirit of fear. We talk about it and know that it’s real, but it’s not like just being afraid. It is heavy, suffocating, dark, and it wants to kill you. Not just your physical life but your spiritual life. I learned what it is to have to fight with the Sword of the Spirit and hit back against the enemy. I learned what it is to honestly submit my will to His and mean it. I learned that when you die to yourself and truly say, “Not my will but Yours be done”, it is a physical, shattering pain in your inner most being. When Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:31, “I die every day.”, I didn’t realize that dying to self could sometimes physically hurt. But it was with that death to self that my mother was given a great victory. They could see where the blood was in her head, but not where it came from. It wasn’t touching the brain tissue, and even though she is classified as a stroke victim, the doctor said there were no actual signs of a stroke.
The next day she was up, talking, praying, witnessing, and it just increased from there. She shared Yeshua with everyone who came into her room, and in ICU Step-down, the niece of the woman she buys her supplements from, a strong woman of God, was her nurse. She got ahold of her aunt, who then prayed for my mom over the phone, but didn’t know that it was my mom that she was praying for. It was a couple of months after she returned home and gone to Joy’s store that she realized and put everything together. She was in rehab for just over a week and was the released and did out-patient therapy for another couple of weeks and was released by the doctor. To look at her, you wouldn’t know that anything had happened to her. And even more incredible is her testimony of what took place while she was going through this physically.
She describes it this way, she remembers lying in a stream or river that she describes like a babbling brook, but was deep enough to submerge her head in, with her face being out of the water. She could see trees and hear birds, so she thinks she was in a garden. She would look to the side and see what was like a big picture window where she could see herself sitting in the wheelchair with blankets around her and she was talking to people but couldn’t hear what was going on and didn’t care because of the peace and warmth she was feeling. She described a warm light all around her and that she could see light that rippled like cloth that would move around her. She couldn’t see a physical form, just the light which made her feel safe, loved, and full of peace. This was over several days, even once she was discharged and we brought her home. Then there was just a day that she was “back”, but she remembers every detail about being in that river, including that although she has short hair, her hair was long while she was in the water and that her head never came out of the water.
As my mother was recovering, my husband then was hit with physical issues of his own, which put him off work for several weeks, turning into months, which turned into time off without pay. Needless to say, it is a pretty scary situation to be in, but each week, Adonai provided what we needed for our bills to be paid. I am thankful for this time as I feel it was time redeemed to us to spend together that we have sacrificed over the course of our marriage due to jobs. It has also taught us the lesson Yeshua taught about living each day and not borrowing trouble from the next. Yesterday, he medically retired from law enforcement, and while writing this, was just offered a new job. When Adonai closed the door on one, He opened the door for another.
To top everything off, earlier in the year I read The Mystery of the Shemitah by Johnathan Cahn and realized that this year beginning September 6th to next September 25th, is a Shemitah year. After reading the book, I felt the need to begin putting back food, to stock our freezers, canned goods, etc. as during the year of remission things can get kind of crazy in the economic realm, and we are seeing that happen. But it wasn’t just because of the Sabbatical year that we were led to stock up on provisions, it was because Adonai knew my husband would be without a job for a couple of months and that we would need this to help make it through until starting a new job.
In spite of a year of turmoil in the natural, I have learned to draw closer to Adonai and embrace His shalom in all areas of my life. I have learned to dig deeper into the Word and discover the beauty that lies within and how personal it really is for each of us. Each post that I write is not simply for the sake of writing, but to put down on paper what it is that Adonai is revealing to my heart, and I want to get it out to others and see them as excited as I am about His Word. I am currently writing on the book of Jeremiah and am seeing clearly how everything he spoke to the people in that day and time are just as relevant and of warning to us in the here and now. I am seeing that He loves us with an everlasting love that we will never really be able to comprehend until we see Him face to face. I am seeing that in these dark days, we have to stand stronger, shine brighter, and hold tighter than ever before because HE IS COMING! Let us go into 2022 with the shofar and proclaim it! HE IS COMING!
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