I have Lost Everything, Including the Fear of Loss

When the Lord asked me to move out to Redding, CA, within 8 weeks, I sold everything I could sell to the best of my ability. Everything else was left in a storage unit in Atlanta, GA. Several weeks ago, I got a phone call from the storage unit facility, warning me that the unit had not been paid for in months and everything was going to be auctioned off if I didn’t pay. I was sharing the unit with a friend who had reassured me all the way up until this phone call, that everything was taken care of. When I asked him about it, he told me not to worry and that he would take care of the balance so our stuff wouldn’t be auctioned off. Then the day before the auction, he ignores my texts, calls and blocks me on FaceBook. The following day, everything we owned was auctioned off. We lost everything we had. Leaving us here in Redding with 1 suitcase of clothes, some toys Skye has accumulated along the way and all of my journals from the past 3 years (thank God I brought them all with me).

I have never known myself to be much of a sentimental person. I have always known myself to let material things for the most part, freely flow in and out of my life, with the exception of a few things that I valued. One of the most important things to me were things I had written. This is because I literally have little to no memory of my life. I have been documenting things starting at age 12 all the way up until now. Age 12 was when I began living a horrific depth of depression and despair and writing was one of my greatest coping mechanisms. At age 12, I remember I decided to start journaling because I felt so horrifically depressed and I thought, I want to write down what is happening in my life so one day I will see how far I have come. Had I known that was only the beginning of the depths of hell I was about to explore, I don’t know that I would have made it this far in life. I was unaware of the fact that my childhood memories were missing and throughout the years from age 12 up until I became pregnant with Skye, I just have fragments of pieces of memories. I hardly remember anything and my journals were the lasting memories I had to look back on. That storage unit held those boxes of memories, comforts, and things that Skye loved. I had all of his sonogram pictures, baby shower items, and baby memoirs in there. I had saved essays and papers I had written in High School and College that were important to me, there were books in there that I treasured, and Skye had tons of toys he loved so much and still talks about. There were all kinds of things of value to me and him in there that probably wouldn’t be worth anything to anyone else.

The day before the auction, as I was getting stonewalled by my friend, I suddenly had a flashback memory of around this time last year. At this time, I had no idea that I was going to be coming to Redding, but one day, I was getting ready to go somewhere, and I heard Holy Spirit really loudly and clearly say, “You’re about to lose it all. But it’ll be worth it!”, in almost a light hearted, laughing kind of way. I stopped what I was doing, and I said, “What?! What do you mean I’m about to lose it all?” I heard nothing in response. I didn’t really know what to do with that so I put it on the shelf in my mind. Fast forward a few months, as I had moved out of the apartment I was in, to move into the city, I got a storage unit and put mostly all of our things in there as we were living with another family until I knew where we were going next. Several months later, as I was a few days away from leaving Atlanta, to move out to Redding, I was walking down the quiet halls of the storage unit facility and I heard Holy Spirit whisper, “You’re about to lose it all. But it’ll be worth it.” I think I was so tired from selling as much stuff as I could and going through boxes and all the preparations of moving across the country, I just shrugged it off half heartedly, like maybe if I don’t really believe him, it won’t happen. But, when this actually became a reality about 6 months later, Oh it stung! Not only was I feeling loss but now I had regret tapping on my shoulder reminding me that I could have done something about it. If only I had… if only I had just pulled out a few boxes and left them with a friend, at least the rest of the toys and things could some how be replaced, or close to it… Oh it hurt!

I will say, I have lost much more greater and valuable things in my life than a storage unit of stuff. On this trip alone, I have had to face incomprehensible heartbreak. I have faced all kinds of discomfort on all levels. I’ve swallowed the pain, and put on a smile during quiet holidays and birthdays, feeling homesick, I’ve gone place to place without a home of my own, figured out how to live off of very small amounts of money at one time while learning how to forsake the nagging pain within of a poverty and lack mindset, I have let go of the comforts of life and embraced this journey with determination that no matter the cost, I am in, all the way.

Leading up to this trip, during my more focused walk following Jesus (the past 3 years), I have lost my jobs, my car, ruined my credit, run completely out of money, and understandably, I’ve been completely misunderstood and sometimes mocked by friends and family along the way. However, I have held onto one thing the whole time, specifically these last 3 years, and that is, the focus of Jesus’ face and remembering and believing our conversations. Jesus is my one focus that holds everything together. He has been my secret strength to sustaining the illogical rhetoric of his ways, that I have been living my life by. My focus and goal has not been to move up the corporate ladder, or build up my resume or make sure I am secure in my finances first. My goal has been this pursuit of Jesus. I have been starving to know him and to live a life style where he is my center and my everything. I know that as long as he is my everything, that all the somethings along the way will fall into place. So I continue to engage with him, what is it really like to live synchronized and unified with him and how can I go deeper into him? What is it like to flow from this place of abundant love? What is it like to be one with love? I have been looking for this house inside of me where I can live in wholeness like I was created to live, with my entire being fully and actively connected to my creator, my one love. So that regardless of what is happening outside of the shell I am living in, I can remain at peace, safe, secure, confident, and completely reassured all is well. But that has not been so easy to obtain, as he has first had to lead me into valleys of darkness to confront the most painful places within, so he can heal them. He has empowered me to chase down, confront, conquor and defeat the taunting giants of my soul so that not one liar stands in between him and I. So that every accusing, deceiving, lying voice is silenced, so him and I can live together in our home inside of me, in peace and at rest.

At times, when I have lost focus of his face, my life has felt like a seemingly endless pit of setbacks because of the severity of my own brokenness. But the reality is, that my brokenness got me into this beautiful mess of discovering who I am and who he is. And that’s because nothing is lost. Everything loops back around to his redemption. Everything. Had I never experienced trauma, I probably still would have discovered who I am. But because I went through the hardships that I have, now I get an even better deal. His redemption takes something that is broken and makes it better than it’s original state before it had ever been broken. And this is the story of the Bible, the universe, the story of humanity, and the story of us as individuals.

I don’t have words to explain what has happened within me, particularly over the last several years when I began regularly conversing with the Lord, nor do I have the means to measure the level of freedom I have discovered. I have found freedom within the deepest pain and that freedom is knowing God’s nature in the midst of my pain and that I don’t have to live in the pain anymore. The greatness and grandness of his nature and his story have become bigger than my life. And I say that, not at all diminishing the importance or value of my life or the things that happen in it, but in addition to it, with a grasp of the overshadowing, grand, nature of his love canopying over and around my life and being. His nature is never to steal from me, but always to build me up. His nature is not for me to lose, but for me to win. And loss is nothing more than an opportunity for me to find out how much greater his redemption is than the pain of what I lost. As I discover and watch this redemption unfold before me, my pain is transformed into awe and overwhelming joy of not just something that was broken is now fixed, but something that was unfixable, is now something much greater than it was before it was ever broken. He has positioned my life in such a way, that I always win. The Lord has carved out such a depth within me, such a strength within me, such a richness, that only the genius Creator of Life, himself, could give.

The day before all my things were auctioned off, I had gone to church that evening and was so moved by the message. At the end of the service, I ran up to the alter as the woman speaking called up anyone who wanted a fresh outpouring of fire of passion for the Lord. She put her hands on me and prayed. I went and laid on the steps of the alter as deep cries erupted from me. Our belongings in the storage unit were the last of everything that could be stripped from me. Yet, there was a much greater story unfolding than I realized in this bitter sweet moment. Here I was laying at the alter, losing the final attachments to my old, dark, dead, self. Losing the final fears of loss as I had nothing else to lose except my life or Skye’s life. I was morphing into the reality of who I really am, a found daughter of God, who has nothing lost, but everything transformed and redeemed.

I laid there on the steps and began to have an encounter with the Lord. The deep cries of deliverance came to a stop. After a moment of quietness, I said, “Lord, tell me, where am I in this process with you?” The Lord clearly responded to me in a loud whisper, “The resurrection.” And as he said this, I saw flowers that were out of the ground, fully bloomed. Along with his words came this lightness that began to gently take over me. I laid there in the comforting arms of Holy Spirit, engulfing my entire being. I felt so light, I felt so comforted. I still had sorrow, but his comfort and peace were so overwhelming that the sorrow stepped way to the back of the room.

That night, as I laid on my pillow, I wept again as memories kept coming up of what was in the storage unit. And the thoughts of some stranger possibly rummaging through years of my life, where I had poured out my soul in journals, my deepest, ugliest and most beautiful thoughts, feelings and experiences. Oh the shame of some stranger possibly reading the old, dark, ugly, secrets of my soul from the old me. And then I cried thinking about the small things that I had been saving for Skye one day, things I had been saving for the house I dreamed about having with the Lord. Then the Lord disrupted my thoughts, and really clearly and gently spoke, “Kate, do you trust me?” Something had happened that night on the alter steps as I was encountering the Lord, an unspoken exchange had happened, in the moment I wasn’t presently aware of it, but once he asked the question, I was starting to recognize it. Although I was facing more loss, there was something so much more important that outweighed it and it was this weight of understanding of his redemption as his nature of who he is. That became solidified within me. Although I had no tangible evidence of his redemption in this current circumstance, or really any of the other loses along the last 3 years of my journey with him yet, I had finally begun to internally grasp who he is to me: my redeemer that I can trust with my life and everything in it. In this moment, I hadn’t completely processed this yet, but there was a knowing within me that already had. So when he ask me, “Kate, do you trust me?” I replied, “Yes Lord. Now I know I trust you.” He responded in agreement with me. He said, “You trust me.” Then he said, “I am giving you back everything that was stolen from you. Everything.”

The following morning, I awoke to the reminder that everything was officially gone. I had 5 missed calls from the storage unit people with last attempts to collect a payment that I was in no position to pay. I put the phone face down and cried a little more. I decided to go on a long walk that morning to give myself the time to process more the concept of loss, a topic the Lord and I have been talking about for years, and the encounter I had experienced with the Lord the night before. After sifting through it all, I remembered how broken I was when I came here. My quality of life was poor, I physically felt so close to death. I was still carrying residual PTSD, and I was still deeply at war within myself. I began to think, if the Lord can wash away and heal years of violation done to me, and completely restore all of the greatest loss I have ever experienced in my life, if he can take my shattered soul, bring back to life my body that was misfiring, exhausted, on the verge of shutting down, how much more will he bring justice to all that has been lost along the way? And that’s when I realized, when I look inside of me, I see his tangible redemption. How much more will I see him redeem the loss outside of me? This is his nature. I also came to realize that it doesn’t so much matter the material things I lost, but what matters is that my heart gets healed and I am free to move forward and live a quality life with joy. Then I thought about the storage unit its self and the prophetic story it told: when I first moved my things into the unit, the facility was called Cross Roads, but since I have moved out here to Redding, they were bought by a company called Morning Star. Jesus, the Morning Star, bought my past, and is redeeming it all now. The only thing that I have lost, is the fear of loss.

 

 

Thank you so much for reading today’s post! I am so grateful to have you on this adventure with me! My prayer is that you would see the tangible redemption of Jesus both inside of you, and in all of the circumstances in your life. In the comments below, I’d love to hear about ways that you have personally experienced the Lord’s redemption in your own life or how this post may resonate with you. Blessings and peace to you and your family, and as always, you’re welcome to share this page!

 

 

 

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