Preface: the Foundation
I recently emerged from a 10-year cycle of refinement. I went through the fire and I have emerged as gold, at least in a spiritual sense. All in a response to a prayer I made a long time ago, in which I asked God to refine me, not fully realizing or understanding what I was asking for. Of course, I didn’t realize this was what was happening until nearly a decade later. I know I still have plenty of growth ahead of me, but I also feel it so strongly in my spirit that I have just completed a cycle and broken many, many cycles and generational patterns in the course of this 10-year process.
I am so excited to share the insights and revelations I have acquired through this refinement process, which has strengthened my spirit, relationship with God, and, of course, my faith. This is the first of a series, the length of which is still to be determined, that I am doing on what it looks like to walk by the spirit, and grow spiritually through the awakening and ascension process. I feel in my spirit this will be a powerful series and will speak to many who are in varying stages of their own spiritual growth or who are in a season requiring they grow their faith.
None of this is based in any religion. It doesn’t matter what religious beliefs you hold. This is about you, God, and your spirit. So, if you find yourself on that ledge and God is calling you to leap, if you are in the midst of a storm, or if you feel like your life is falling apart and you are struggling to find your way, then I pray this series will serve as a lamp on your path and that my lessons learned will help you in your own awakening, spiritual walk, or leap of faith.
I have titled this series Moving in Faith: Insights on Strengthening Faith and Growing in the Spirit. This is the preface. I feel it is important to lay this foundation before diving deeper into the future topics. This is what I have moved through in the past 10 years, the process of walking by faith and not by sight that has become clear to me in reflecting on this past 10 years, and what I believe is the purpose of these seasons that lead us to strengthen our faith and awaken our spirit.
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Alright, all that said, let’s dive in! I think it is going to be something of a course in some respects and is really going to help a lot of people. I have been on fire about this all day. I am giving all glory to the Most High, God, right here from the get go as without God I don’t know where I would be and I am just the vessel through which He is moving and speaking in this series.
I started receiving the downloads to create this series over the past week or so, and, today the spirit is moving through me so strongly. I now understand that this ministry began about ten years ago. It is becoming crystal clear to me that God has been developing this ministry through all that I have been through in the past 10 years, and even through my whole life in some respects.
For today, I am just laying a foundation for the upcoming weeks of this series. Over the course of the series, I will be doing deeper discussions on specific topics related to faith. Today I will start with faith as a process of remembering who we truly are, or at least this is an outcome. What do I mean when I say “remembering who you truly are?”
I am referring to the fact that you are not your body, your name, your mind; yet, this is what most of us think we are, this is what we identify as. But it isn’t who you are. You are a fractal of the Most High, Source, God, whatever label you want to give the Creator. And, because you are a part of God, you are also God, you are a unique spiritual expression of God, and you are everyone else. We are all one, because we are all fractals of God. The notion that we are separate and less than is not from God, it is from the world.
The world has given us the false perception of separateness from God. Religion has a lot to do with this. I am not here to attack your religion, but I am here to give you truth in this series, and the truth is that you are not separate from God, you aren’t separate from the person next to you and you aren’t separate from your spirit. I believe this is part of why we are here; to remember this, and that life is a process of shedding these layers of conditioning we amass from the time we enter this world.
If you have started the process of spiritual awakening, this will speak to you. If not, this may sound really out there or it may go over your head, and I get that because there was a time this didn’t land for me. But I have always had this desire for the truth. There was a moment years ago, when I was sort of between religions (I have practiced several different religions in my life) and I asked God, “please, show me what’s true. I want to know you God, I want to know what’s right, what’s true, but I can’t find my way in the noise of all these different religions, all of which claim to be right.” And then I forgot about it. But God didn’t. I didn’t know it at the time, but He started me down the path to truth right then and there, and it started with a random urge to start reading the Bible and understanding it for myself.
But this isn’t about the Bible or a specific religion. This is a primer for the series. So, stepping back a little bit, this past 10 years has been marked by seven seasons in which I had to move in faith; seasons where my situation left me with nowhere else to turn but God and no other choice but to trust God and strengthen my faith. These seven seasons were:
- June-August 2014: The 10-year cycle started with the ending of my marriage. My ex-husband moved out July 2014, I was pregnant with our second child, my daughter at the time. The books God led me through in the wake of this were Genesis 37-50 (story of Joseph) and Exodus.
- October – November 2015: The death of my father and God positioning me to be the spiritual rock for my family at that time. (Genesis 37-50 Joseph)
- August 2016: Pregnancy with my third child and the subsequent disappearance of his father after I found out I was pregnant.
- March 2019: The heartbreak that nearly took me out. Again, managing to have found an insincere and dishonest man, who “swept me off my feet” just to break my heart. This ultimately set me on my path to inner healing and spiritual awakening.
- September 2020: Getting my dream job and then realizing it wasn’t as I had dreamed. While I loved so much about this job, I ended up having far too much placed on my shoulders for any person and spent much of my last year in this job under extreme stress. (Esther)
- April 2022-present (2024): Moving from my lifelong home in Sacramento, CA to Montana. A number of factors led me to the decision to do this. I didn’t want to leave my lifelong home, but felt I had no choice. It has since become clear that God was relocating me to complete much of my inner healing, awaken my spiritual gifts, and clarify my calling. (Exodus)
- August -October 2023: God calling me to leave my last job, despite not having a new job and not having income coming through my business. (Job, Exodus)
Looking back on this now, there was a process to each season of faith:
- The triggering event/catalyst (divorce, death, break-up, etc.)
- The leap
- Starting on the path (road rises to meet you, synchronicities, serendipity)
- The storm (and the calm within the storm)
- The crumbling and humbling
- Feeling (finding) your way/walking blind (by faith not sight)
- The rebuild/restoration
Also, in reflection on this past 10-year cycle of my life, and these 7 seasons of spiritual growth and movement in faith, I see there were specific areas of my life impacted: finances, relationships, and self/spirit (unworthiness, self-doubt/self-assurance, connecting to my soul, deepening connection with God).
This takes me to the last aspect of the foundation I want to lay out in the preface to this series on moving in faith, which is going back to where I started, that it is a process of remembering who we are. We come into this life remembering/knowing who we are – spirit. Our memory of this is erased, and our life becomes a journey to recall the truth. I recently had a hypnotherapy session in which I remembered not just my birth, but where I was before my birth. I didn’t want to leave to come here, but I had accepted that I had agreed to come here. I remember feeling a tremendous love, which is why I didn’t want to leave. Then I remember what appeared to be going through a portal and next waking in my mother’s arms.
Most of us can’t remember much of our early childhood, let alone our births. I wouldn’t have without this hypnosis session I had, but it confirmed what I am saying, that we forget who we truly are and faith is how we can find our way back to the truth.
As we grow from baby, to child, to teen, to adult, we become more and more of the world, or rooted in our worldly identity; i.e. our body, mind, name, background. This is what being of the world means; you’re aligning your identity, sense of self with these constructs, that only exist and have meaning here. But they are false and are the root of all of the problems, pain, etc. Aligning ourselves with the world, being conditioned as we are and forgetting the truth, creates this false perception of separateness from God and each other. Being of the world or rooted in the world, looks like the following:
- Basing your worth and or others’ value on looks, money, type of job or job title, status, wealth or affluence, race, religion, political views or affiliation
- Perceiving yourself as separate from God, from your own spirit, and from other people
- Judging aka the need to organize and categorize aspects of yourself and others. This looks like:
- Comparison
- Condemnation
- Superiority/inferiority
- Black or white thinking/absolute thinking
- Competition
- Conditions
- Clinging to things, which looks like:
- Titles/status/station
- Money/wealth/lack
- Home/house/where you live
- People/relationships
- Material things
- Idolizing, which looks like:
- Celebrities
- Politicians
- Money
- Leaders – pastors, priests, bosses, mentors
- Symbols
- Groups
I am going to leave it at this for this preface to the series. Each installment of this series will go deeper into different aspects of moving in faith and spiritual growth. My intention for this series is to pull from my experiences from this 10-year cycle I’ve just ended and share the revelations from it as well as provide some practical information to help others moving through their own storm or leap of faith.
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