After I repented, accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior and was born again, I received a hunger for the word of God. I say I received it because it came with my salvation. Right after I got saved, I went out and got a Bible to start reading. In roughly 4 months, I broke the spine of my new Bible, and it began to fall apart. As I read the word, the Holy Spirit would start to show me the meanings in the scripture, but I was in such a feeding frenzy I wouldn’t slow down and meditate on what the Holy Spirit was teaching me. I was amazed by the word and couldn’t get enough of talking to others about Jesus and his word.

Eventually, I backslid and ended up moving to another state and reunited with my best friend (and sister-in-law), who had also become a Christian. I was what would be classified as Baptist, and she was charismatic of the Assembly of God variety. She began working on me about getting right with God, but also about her doctrines which were different than mine. We would sit at her table and debate eternal security and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. After a while I just relented even though I didn’t fully believe, I just wanted peace. It was careless of me to give in for those reasons, to relent for the sake of peace by compromising what I believed. Even if I would have been totally incorrect with what I was believing, she had not actually proven her point with the word to the degree that it convinced me, I relented for friendship and peace. This left me ripe for deception because I was a compromiser.

I ended up attending the AOG church with my best friend for almost 2 years and in that time, I joined the church and became a Sunday School teacher and a youth leader then my husband and I moved back home. I tried to find a Church to attend that was like the one I had been serving in, and ended up going to one that I had visited when I was 14 or 15.
My daughter started attending their pre-k and I started getting involved attending services, bible studies and prayer meetings. It was at a prayer meeting that I met 2 women, “S” and Diane. “S” had just graduated from Rhema Bible Training Center under Kenneth Hagin who ordained her himself…. and Diane was a humble woman who loved the Lord and his word.

One prayer meeting, I mentioned that I was blessed by the book Prison to Praise, only to have “S” say this book was unscriptural…. and we should never praise God for hardship. She began to talk to me about speaking things into existence. I was impressed by her…she was an ordained minister who had just graduated and was preaching at our Church and praying over people… to me that was credentials enough to start listening to her. In fact, I didn’t even bother to seek out the word to see if she was teaching sound doctrine. All the Kenneth Hagin books she had given me or recommended to me had scripture in them and his teachings to explain what they meant. That was enough for me…. and it’s also how I took a long walk into deception that cost me YEARS.

Eve did kind of the same thing in the garden when the serpent tempted her… instead of going to the word of God, she just went with the serpent because it sounded good… it sounded right.

I started going with “S” to minister to people or pray…or even to attend the Alumni week of teaching at Rhema. I considered her my best friend, we were pretty much together all the time. My doctrine now was that of a typical Hagin taught disciple…and to be completely honest, I spent very little time reading the word. I was also terrified to question anything… I was afraid of offending the Holy Spirit or questioning the integrity of the teachings from “God’s Anointed”. I wish I knew where this fear started or who instilled it in me…. but I can’t put my finger on when it happened… just that it was there, keeping me in line and from seeking the truth that would set me free. My heart breaks just to write that. I knew something was wrong, and I wanted to make it right, but fear held me down.

I never went into this deception with the need for wealth… I wanted to serve God and be a good Christian…I love Jesus. The Word of Faith doctrine FELT powerful and strong… and like it was right, except…it bore no fruit. Even though they claim that we are saved by grace and not works, they teach and practice a works based “faith”. For example, to be healed, a person has to deny their disease even when the disease is eating them alive, they can’t let their confession of faith waver, or they won’t be healed. This is works…. not divine healing. If the doctrine failed to produce fruit, the ministers flip the fault off of the doctrine and on to the person by simply saying their faith wasn’t strong enough, or they wavered, or their confession wasn’t right.

Sister Diane, the other lady I mentioned, called the doctrine “S” taught “Blab it and Grab it”. She had nothing nice to say about it and confronted it with the word. By that time I was so far gone I had become arrogant and considered Diane to be ignorant of the truth. She annoyed me and I dismissed her. These days I look forward to seeing her in heaven so I can thank her for her boldness.

Eventually because I was serving God in the flesh, I backslid from even that fleshy commitment. I remained in that state for years… 6 of which were spent going in and out of mental hospitals. When I met “S” SUDDENLY I started being tormented mentally….and I didn’t know why. I gave up on life out of exhaustion and for 6 years was living on a cocktail of the most powerful antipsychotics a person can take. I was literally sitting in a chair drooling on myself most of the time.

Where was the 19 year old who couldn’t get enough of God’s word…who couldn’t stop talking about Jesus in all of this? She was fighting her way back.

When I finally got off of the medications, my husband had left me and I was one ANGRY mess of a human being. My children were all adults now, and even they were tired of me.

Because the Word of Faith doctrine failed me.. I also walked away from …I can’t put God here because I wanted God, but not that religion…. so I walked away from religion.

Now the whole entire time all of this was going on…all 39 years…the Word of God that I had gobbled up like a hungry baby was bubbling up inside my spirit. Any situation that needed a scripture to address it was met with a scripture coming up in my spirit. The word stayed alive inside of me…the false doctrines faded… but the Word stayed.

God is gracious… and so loving and kind… in spite of my sinfulness, rejection, anger, drunkenness….he never abandoned me…he was so long-suffering and gentle with me because I was absolutely fragile when I came home to him.

The Homecoming

The trek home started with a prayer. I was laying in my bed in the dark. I was in the same spot of the same house that I was in when I prayed the sinners prayer all those years before. My prayer this times was , “God, I don’t know how you can get me out of this mess I’m in in my life, but I’m asking you to please fix this situation.”

My life then fell absolutely apart. My partner was arrested as a fugitive from justice who had been on the run for 17-20 years, depending on what news you tuned in to that night. I was questioned, and my home was searched. Because they claimed my partner had given them a false name, the feds were involved. It all looked so sensational… but the truth is actually quite bland.

My husband did in fact have 2 warrants. His name was illegally changed in childhood when his mother left his abusive father. Back in the early 70s women didn’t get the help they do now… and often the police would deal with domestic violence by taking the husband off to jail for the night, so everyone can cool off and work it out. This doesn’t work when the husband in question gets his kicks waterboarding a newborn to stop him from crying and burning a 2-year-old with cigars. So my husband’s mother took drastic measures to protect her children… she left and changed their name. My husband went back to using his actual surname when he left his home town… but the problem is, the government knows him only by the name his mother gave them… so when he gave his actual name, it came up that he was using an alias. We have since changed all the records to his actual name.

As for the two warrants, they ended up charging him with 2 misdemeanors, not felonies. One of which was dropped because the charge was unwarranted entirely. Without going in to a lot of detail because this is not my story to tell, it’s my husbands…these warrants were more about the powers that be keeping tabs on his location.

So, my partner was extradited back to the state his family lives in because this is where the charges came from. It’s funny too because the Marshals that escorted him both said they don’t understand why they are extraditing on old charges like this that aren’t violent…they had never seen anyone do this…and the lawyers said the same thing.

But here is what happened as a result of this arrest and extradition. My partner reunited with his mother, sisters and brothers. He was able to legally change his name back to his real name and we were married. Nothing came of the charges against him. His desire to disappear was from personal wounds….of which I will not go in to. He has since faced and dealt with things. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY… he reached out to God and accepted Jesus as his savior. The entire journey through this trial of trials brings me to tears because of all the ways God showed his tender mercies and love. AND YET… my own recovery was to come.

My Recovery

After my husband and I had returned home, I was closer to God, but still tormented and confused by the false doctrine. For a couple of years I struggled along until I hit my breaking point…and then I prayed this prayer, “God, I’m laying aside every doctrine I think I know, every interpretation I’ve learned from man… and I’m beginning again… please guide me into all truth by the Holy Spirit… I don’t want to believe anything that isn’t in the word… teach me to rightly divide the word of truth…in Jesus’s name…AMEN”

I began again…and the excitement for the word came back like it was when I first started out…. actually there is a maturity now.

What I dreaded when it began became the very thing I needed and from this I learned how to trust the Lord. A tree that never experiences strong winds that bend it and break some of the weaker roots, never developes strong ones that will substain the tree…and it’s not just to keep the tree upright when strong wind comes… it’s to grow roots that go deep to the water source that remains even in a drought. I learned to welcome the testing.