Healing Warrior Chronicles- a highly censored, spiritually ranking medicine woman

A conversation I had with a friend the other day inspired this post. Depression runs rampant and it’s peculiar that so many people afflicted with this ailment are Christians. Why is that? There was a time in my life when I was under a deep dark depression, and I too was a Christian during this time. Thoughts of suicide entered my mind occasionally, as I felt like I was stuck in the bottom of a huge black pit with a glass ceiling. This experience and others throughout my life have taught me some things. And I’m grateful for those things because it allows me to shed a little light on this subject.I’d like to start off with a story. When I was attending middle school in Corpus Christi, Texas I would often get treated differently than all of my girlfriends. The school I attended was a magnet school for the arts and it changed into a magnet school for the arts as an effort to clean it up. That unfortunately didn’t change things and it probably averaged at least 5 fights a day. Uniforms were required to prevent things like jealousy but nonetheless girls would come up to me and threaten me for no other reason than the fact that they were jealous. They were jealous because I was different, because I stood out! This was in 6th grade, it’s actually the reason I ended up getting saved but that’s another story. .. Fast forward to 8th grade, my first year in school at my new home of Kansas City, Missouri. This school was unlike schools I had experienced before. There was a distinct popular group of girls and everyone knew who they were. They liked being the center of attention and quite often that was made very obvious. Once again I was different, possibly stole some of their light even though I was not fond of being the center of attention. By high school quite a few of them had a serious issue with me. Not to mention I had a couple other older girls on my back. Coming home to my mom feeling hurt and expressing my emotions was a normal thing. She would always tell me to just smile in their faces. “How people treat you is a reflection of them, and how you respond is a reflection of you.”, was another of her favorite sayings. I kept this in mind as much as I could. However I was a very sensitive person as I still am and had a heart of putting others before myself. By the third year of us living there it got to be too much. I didn’t like being the source of drama, I didn’t like making others jealous just by being myself. Later on, after my second year of highs school in Kansas City I found out we were moving again. This time to Dallas, Texas.

Probably just a few days later, depression started to sink in. In fact my church youth group and I went on a mission trip to Mexico that week and the whole time it felt like I wasn’t even there. It was scary, I had never experienced that before. I told everyone how I felt like I was just dreaming. When we arrived in Dallas, Texas I became convinced through the previous jealousy that being myself was a bad thing, I was determined not to experience jealousy issues from there on out. With moving again, there was also the feeling of instability and I missed my friends terribly. My light went out and I fell under the radar and completely lost myself. Standing in the kitchen of our new apartment one day I felt completely split down the middle like I was 2 people in one body. It terrified me. Crying became a very frequent thing. I felt trapped inside myself, I was in my own hell. By the next year I began taking depression medication to combat my despair but I knew I couldn’t stay on it forever. The crazy thing is during this time I still prayed and had strong faith. I had 2 jobs at one point and one of them was a clothing store. One day a coworker spoke to me for the first time and asked me if I was a Christian. She said her mom had multiple tumors in her body and asked me to pray that when she goes in to get another x-ray the next day that they would be gone. I led her to a more private area grabbed her by her hands and began to pray with absolute authority. I prayed that her mom would be restored to complete wholeness and had no doubt in my mind that the things I were saying would come to pass. The next day my friend shouted my name ecstatically and said, “you did it!” Her mothers tumors were completely gone. She invited me to church later that week and I attended with her and her mom.There is a story within this story but I will leave that part out. The church we went to was pastored by an older women in her 70’s and she was prophesying that night. During the service she called me up and told me that something or someone had been harassing me and she couldn’t have been more right. That’s exactly what going on and it was something not someone. I couldn’t have described it better myself. Something was harassing me hardcore on the inside for the past few months!I had probably been on depression medication for about a year and then I really had to start dealing with things. So I did and it helped me get off of the medication. This is all to say that I have been depressed, although that was probably the worst bout of depression in my life. However I have learned other things of significance from trials in my life. One of the major things is that for me, depression was always spiritual. It is spiritual for many other people as well even though it can be hard to spot that connection. Throughout the years I have learned through a couple bouts with cancer that deep down I hated myself. The enemy was feeding me so many lies and I was eating them up like candy. So many twisted truths I discovered that I had to sort through and correct with His truth. Because the best way to combat a lie is with the Truth. During my cancer I was extremely spiritually unhealthy. Somehow I came under the idea that I didn’t deserve success, so to have it on the outside I had to punish myself on the inside. I was rebellious, I was bitter and I held onto offense, I was fearful, and even after having a revelation of His love when I first got saved, it became hard for me to take it in. In fact, the very act of forcing myself to take in His love made me depressed because I was not used to it. “Perfect love casts out fear because fear has to do with punishment.” .. That leads me to this, years after surviving cancer I was blessed to have a deep revelation of Gods grace. Often times we try to be our own God and make ourselves do things we don’t want to do & we risk being inauthentic with God. For the sake of not making a long story even longer, I had really gotten out of my comfort zone and while I was practicing something the Lord impressed upon me it made me want to do something some religious Christians would consider a sin, which in certain contexts it can be. Just like anything else done out of a lack of faith. When I was doing this thing however I found the Lord and could hear him more clearly which to me was a little weird because I started thinking in the box that can be typical Christianity. I thought it was weird how I was worshipping & having experiences with the Lord while doing this thing deemed sin, and he told me “Come as you are” He told me to keep seeking Him and He will bring me out. He kept shedding His grace on me while I was able to be myself with Him and that’s when I went from loving the Lord to falling IN love with the Lord.This brings me to the moral of my story. It wasn’t until I finally understood Grace deep down that depression, whether here or there however sporadic it was, finally left me. I’m not just talking about a few encounters with Grace. I’m talking about repetitive practice. I’m talking about something the Lord would impress upon me out of His Grace- “practice makes permanent. ” It was an internal programming that had to be corrected and that was a process. God is not interested in your religion. He’s not interested in us counting our steps or being our own Gods. He is not interested in condemnation. That is why he sent His son. The bible says ” even now the gospel is veiled to those who are perishing.” What that means is that if you are perishing, in whatever way may that be depression, some part of the gospel is being veiled. There is something you are not getting in its fullness, in it’s glory. For me, that was Grace. Even for having been a Christian for years, I still felt condemnation. I didn’t get it, and it was what felt like a long process ’til I finally did. We’ve all done things we consider wrong in our lives for the most part. There are things in our lives we wish or know we could have done better. However, what is necessary to understand is that we have already been forgiven. That doesn’t give us a pass to not learn from our mistakes but it does give us freedom of not being bound by those things any longer. .. TO BE CONTINUED“Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. “