As you read Gotta Die to Live I invite you to join Chris and I on a transforming journey. God is our healer and we all need healing in some areas of our lives. As we learn to love God first and foremost, I believe we can find deep healing in our relationships with others. In our autobiography I touch on many of these issues from first hand experience in order to try and help others find healing through the power of God.
As I wrote in the book: The scriptures tell us that you can’t heal a wound by saying it’s not there. God desires us to be truthful in our innermost being. This is because He is our good Father and wants to thoroughly heal us.
Imagine someone hiding an infected injury from a wonderful surgeon who had the will and power to make good of the troubled area and alleviate the pain. In this sense, coming into the light with our issues is both freeing and beautifully restorative.
Our transforming journey begins with Jesus
Jesus is the divine physician and we need not fear His work. I hope you find these words encouraging on your journey to wholeness or as you deal with deep emotional hurts. For those who are struggling in marriage, know that all relationships, called together by God, are battlefields.
True unity between a husband and wife is a rare and wonderful thing. Since the complete harmony of Adam and Eve’s kinship in the Garden of Eden was disrupted, mankind’s need to get back into relationship with God and each other has been fiercely contested.
We can find healing in our relationships with our spouses and others by yielding to the Holy Spirit. This process turns an orphaned heart into a parented one. The true model for church life is within the construct of a healthy family relationship. It has nothing to do with a religious, hierarchical structure.
A restored intimacy with God and with each other are key to our transforming journey. This is something I share about in my books The Purple Veil and Exit Darcus which focus on the deeper meaning of relationships.
Walking with God when the sky turns black
Sometimes, on life’s journey, you have to go by way of a tunnel that you would never choose to go through. There is no other direction that you can travel in. You simply cannot turn back, avoid it, climb over it, or get out of it. You have to go through it. These are the times when you pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the Good Shepherd. I call it, ‘walking with God when the sky turns black.’
These situations are the ones in which you need to dig deep; trusting in, clinging to, and relying on God in a special way. Though the giants of fear cast their enormous shadow and the storm threatens to violently steal your peace, you have to draw on the truth that God is good. Ultimately, He has broken the very thing that man fears the most, death.
Gotta Live to Die
I invite you to find out more about embracing a transforming journey as you read Gotta Die to Live. The story tells how my husband Chris and I were able to develop courage through our faith in God. We could do this because Christianity to us was not so much a religion or ideology but a relationship with a loving Heavenly Father who created marriage and family and wanted us to win!
All of this was developed within the context of outworking the call of God on our lives. God is the only one who can truly give us genuine purpose, value and identity and I pray you will find these through our story as you continue on your own transforming journey. May God continue to do a great work in your life as He has done in mine.
