Part 9

While at Mercy Ships in Lindale, Texas,

I was asked to be a helper for some of the moms there.

I would have been helping with the schooling of their children.

The problem was that I had put in my three months of service already, and

in order to continue on, I would have to take the Discipleship Training School or DTS.

A DTS consists of a three-month lecture phase and

then two months of outreach anywhere in the world,

anywhere that God put on the heart of the people to go really.

I went home.

I really didn't think I could pull it off financially as it did cost a little bit of money.

While at the Mercy Ship base, I had been able to sit in on the DTS that had started that winter.

The speakers were amazing.

Having been an established YWAM base for over 30 years,

they were able to get some of the top speakers from all over the world.

One of them was Doug Easterday, who spoke on the Father heart of God.

It was an absolutely amazing message especially for those who never had a real father.

When at home, I got back to work.

I was able to be an extra in a movie for about a week.

And, I called a YWAM base in Montana to see about taking the fall DTS.

I put my fleece out there and

told God that if they were going to go to Australia for outreach,

I would ask for an application and fill it out.

When I asked, that was exactly where they said they were planning on going.

I got the application, filled it out and sent it back.

I still had to be accepted though.

I was accepted and I drove to Trego, Montana that fall.

Again, it was an AWESOME time in my life.

Beyond AWESOME and AMAZING.

The focus of a DTS is simply serving God, learning about Him,

and being trained to go out and share the gospel with other people,

not to mention dealing with the deep-rooted hurts in your life that needed to

come out before one can go on to minister to others.

The speakers were amazing with their stories of how God worked in their lives

and the miraculous things God did for them and through them.

Again, one of the classes was on the Father Heart of God.

I didn't get the amazing speaker, Doug Easterday, but it was still an amazing time,

with an amazing time of healing, deep-rooted healing.

When a person goes through an abusive situation or experiences abuse or,

really in this day and age, the awful pain that people go through and endure,

the question asked is WHY??

Now religious people can tell you, “Don't question God”

Or, “It is all part of God's plan.”

Worse yet, the one that I hate the most is,

“It builds your character” or “It makes you who you are.”

They say this, because, they themselves do not understand the answer.

They simply show their ignorance of not understanding who God is

and God's amazing love for us.

So, WHY??

Why did God allow me to go through what I went through?

Why do others have to go through what they have had to go through?

One thing that I can say is that

it does not make you a stronger individual.

It may help you to understand someone else's situation

and the pain of what they have gone through, but

it does not make you a stronger person.

The Scripture that set me free of this was John 10:10:

“The theif cometh not,

but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy:

I am come that they might have life,

and that they might have it more abundantly.”KJV

Satan wants to destroy our lives.

That is his goal.

God didn't put me in my situation.

He did not cause my situation nor did God have control over it.

This is a funny statement to say when we also say that God controls this world.

He does control the world but He does not control us.

We are sinners. Sin controls us.

Until we come to the acknowledgment that we are sinners,

that we need God and that God has a better way for our lives,

we flounder around in sin.

We live in a fallen world that sin entered into

through Adam and Eve.

God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to break that bondage of sin,

to set us free from it.

Satan wants to destroy us.

He wants to kill us.

He wants us in Hell with him

and he is doing everything he can to see to that happening.

I liken it to a persecuted Christian in another country.

They are fleeing for their lives,

trying to save their children.

All they want to do is get out and live,

live freely.

The few that do get out of that bondage,

don't say,

“I need to go back for God to teach me 'character'.”

That is foolishness.

A lot of them do have amazing stories to tell of how God protected them.

I can look back on my life and see how God did protect me,

how He protected me many times from the abuse

and what was going on in my home.

When they get out, they desire to live in that freedom,

abundantly and overflowing.

Sadly, so many people do not get this.

So, many people who claim to be “Christians”

do not get this,

my mother being the first and foremost.

As I shared with her what God was doing in my life,

it was constantly met with, “That is not true, that is wrong,

that isn't scriptural.”

Now I have the understanding that people just aren't going to “get”

what God is doing or saying in our own lives.

In one of those phone conversations with my mother, I mentioned

that I still needed a $1000 to finish paying for the DTS.

I needed this money before we left for outreach which was about three weeks away.

My mother made the retort,
“Well, I guess I have to pay for this too.”

It was really an odd thing for her to say as she had paid nothing toward me

taking the DTS. I had paid for the majority of everything myself

except for the little bit of support money I had gotten from different churches.

I informed her that I would not take her money and that God was going to provide for it.

He did.

At the end of the week I had all the money I needed to go.

I found out later that my mother was calling the
YWAM director and “talking” to him.

She was obviously trying to control and manipulate things behind my back.

She had gone so far as sending him a set of books by Hudson Taylor.

My mother has a great professing “love” for God and an extreme “love”

of spiritual living books. She has shelves and shelves of spiritual living books.

Most of them are by popular authors that everyone reads.

I have to say that I developed an extreme hatred of most of these books.

When one does not have an understanding of who God is and

what Jesus Christ has done for them on the cross,

when one has a warped sense of who they are in Christ

and their place in the body of Christ,

these books and the people who read them become nothing more than

tools of destruction.

Our DTS left for Australia for our outreach.

Australia was fun and a great adventure.

God did amazing things there and we met some amazing people.

We ministered and helped at the Australian rodeos,

met different people in Australia that were involved

with the agricultural people and already ministering there.

We shared our testimonies, encouraged others and

put on dramas.

Being part of the dramas was a new thing for me.

They were powerful and amazing.

Coming home, we went through a week of debriefing

We had a graduation party, and we were homeward bound again.

I had actually gotten a hole in my gas tank and

I had asked my parents to come over for the graduation.

I really didn't want to go home, but I had no choice.

At this time, I did have braces on too,

which I was paying for,

although my mother did make the payments for them while I was taking my DTS,

One of the few things she ever paid for.

During debriefing, the DTS leaders and director of the YWAM base

had a special prayer time with each student.

During this time, I did talk about my distress about going home again.

The YWAM director made a statement that he hadn't believed what I had said about my mother.

Obviously, she was telling him another story over the phone,

but after that prayer time, he knew what I was saying was the truth.

Again, I was completely oblivious that my mother had been talking to him behind my back.

Heading home met with its own set of challenges.

My mother informed me how much I had cost her in coming to Montana,

renting a trailer to pull my little pickup back, how much it cost in gas, etc.

I had actually paid for the place for them to stay and their meal while they were in Montana.

When I got home, she made it clear she was disgusted with me.

She wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't set a place for me at the table at dinner time.

She informed me when I got home how much I cost her for just living in her house

which was $2000 a year.

This was broken down in how much water I used, electricity I used,

food I ate, and well, I am not sure exactly what else.

Again, I bought my own clothes, put gas in my own vehicle,

paid the insurance on my own vehicle, and pretty much took care of myself.

While I was on outreach,

she had made it clear that she was not going to be opening the restaurant

again either.

In other words,

she would not be needing me anymore.

Some of this had to do with me taking part in the dramas.

Acting was a sin, according to her.

One of these dramas we did for graduation.

It was a powerful drama of God creating man,

man turning from God and turning to the things of this world

(mainly money, woman, and drugs)

And how these things destroy man,

and then how God intervenes in our life,

takes our sin upon Himself,

and how Jesus Christ took our sin upon Himself

and died in our place, for the sins that we should have died for.

It portrayed how Jesus Christ conquered sin through death on the cross and His resurrection.

It was a powerful, powerful drama to be part of.

My DTS was summed up by her,

“It looks like you just had fun.”

Missionaries aren't supposed to have fun I guess.

They have to be miserable, with long faces, and no joy.

The relationship with my mother was never one that I could understand.

It was never a relationship really at all.

There were two statements that constantly went through my head:

the one made by the leader at Teen Missions saying it sounds like my mother was jealous of me

and a statement made by my dad.

He said, “I thought Christians are supposed to love one another.”

John 13:35 - “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another;

as I have loved you, that ye also lone one another” (KJV)

This always plagued me as well.

I wanted to love my mother. I tried,

but I always fell short.

It would be years later that it occurred to me

that it was not my job to love my mother unconditionally.

It was my mother’s job to love me.

After all, I did not born her out,

she born me out.

I was the child,

not her.

The truth is, a person who is not loving herself to begin with

doesn't know how to love or except love from someone else.

They cannot acept love from others and have nothing in return to give.

Also, looking at that Scripture,

What did Jesus Christ do for us?

He gave His life for us.

He laid His life down for us.

My mother absolutely did not ever lay down her life for her children.

She has clung to a relationship that brought abuse, lies, fear, and harm

into her children's lives, completely unwilling to protect them first and foremost.

Despite getting a job when I got home,

I ended up moving to Salem to live with my grandparents,

my dad's parents.

My grandmother had told me years before that if I ever needed a place to go,

I could come to her house.

I took her up on that offer.

My mother, on the other hand, told me that I could go live on the streets of Bend.

Mind you it was in the middle of winter.