A Dance With Our King

by Dawn
(Illinois, USA)

I’m overcome with Praise today because it has been almost 3 years that I have been dancing with our Father. GOD, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!

For most of my life I was searching for lots of things. Searching for who I was, what I was to do, searching for love and friendship and just a validation that I was okay the way I looked. I had always been a Christian, raised in the Faith, did church, and lived a religious Christian existence. But I was just playing a roll, Christianity was a hobby for me, it was more like the cross around my neck was jewelry, I didn’t know how much blood had been shed for that identity. I had zero self-confidence, no self-esteem, and believed that I was dumb and stupid and ugly growing up. So at 16 I decided that if only I was thinner then a boy would like me, I would be popular and things would just be overall better. Boy was I wrong! I don’t know why satan chose to wage war with me and my thighs and why he fed me the belief that the cure for stress was a thinner body but I believed him. By the time college rolled around I was lost in the emotions of sadness, loneliness, and daily homesickness. The demonic oppression of negative thoughts was a daily obsession, I tried every negative behavior and fell even further and further when I couldn’t accomplish a particular behavior, my mind was warped. I believed the cruel and spiteful words that satan brought to my soul and continued to deepen the wounds with more and more negative self-talk. I accepted others comments as true and began repeating them both internally. I tried to fill my loneliness and insecurity with unhealthy coping mechanisms, but God always loved me, I just didn’t know how much.

Some days I wonder how many times God tried to get me to change, I know of some people he put into my life that I didn’t listen to. I really, really liked to do things under my own strength! Because of my continuing anxiety I hated leaving the house, and that was actually a good choice on a particular day in May 2007. While doing random goggling I read a testimony online that changed my life!!!!! This girl wrote about her freedom from eating disorders, not recovery or recovered but about being FREE! And she did this with God’s help. Whoa! I mean I’d never heard such a thing before! That's not what I was taught in treatment or by any therapist. I wanted that freedom; I wanted that way of life . She seemed so happy, so amazing and confident and was living a wonderful life. I was scared but I was filled with hope and I wanted to let God change me. But how? For the next 3 months, I read that testimony over and over, daily, memorizing the words, I knew there was a God component to me getting better, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I was content to stay broken because it was all I had ever known. I had made up my mind to just ‘get by’ for a few more years. I knew how to starve myself and take pills. I knew how to pretend like a master, I knew how to feed others my lies. But to ‘let go’ and let someone else take control, I didn’t know how to do that.....

I was hungry for God and His Love...

I needed Him…

So in August 2007, I started calling Christian treatment centers, because I knew that God had to be involved in this somehow. I also decided to seek out this girl whose testimony was breaking through the walls around my heart and see if there was anything more she could tell me about God. And here is where my ‘new life’ took over!!!!!! I rededicated my life to my heavenly King and began my dance.

God started slowly cleaning the cracks in my heart...and filling them with His love. Jesus touched me and healed me in so many ways. I could feel His love surrounding me, filling me up and filling my heart where that hole and that ache was. I believed that Jesus was living inside me, which meant I needed to feed my body. Food no longer became my crutch for every obstacle.

I can now see how God has used EVERY event in my life to bring about HIS glory. Without God, this past year would have been radically different. It amazes me just to see how far God has brought me in the past year alone. I was at the end of my hope rope BUT by the grace of God and only His grace I was transformed. He has bigger plans than my destruction and death. My burdens aren’t burdens any longer. God is now my coping mechanism. I have an amazing testimony to what God can and will do. When they say ‘You are a new creation in Christ’, they aren’t kidding! I can’t believe how new and restored I feel each and every day. I LOVE being an overcomer!

I know that without God I would not have made it this far in life. He is my strength, my light, my hope, my everything. I want to live my life to show that I may make mistakes and not always act accordingly, but I use God and His Word to cope and grow. I rely on my Godly Beliefs to get me back on track. I used to just talk the talk, and now, I walk the walk. I know He'd have done far more much earlier had I let Him, but I was stubborn about that a lot of times.

I’m a woman who has been restored, who was given new life by Christ, and I’m walking it out so that He may use me in the way He sees best…so here I am Lord….

God’s saving message for us says that there is FREEDOM! Freedom means casting EVERY last struggle before His feet as signs of His triumph and victory. God is so important to me. I don't know where I would be if He hadn't come into my life.

"WHERE THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS, THERE IS FREEDOM!!!!”

God's love - God's truth - has set me free. My chains are gone and I am FREE INDEED!