Red Rope Ministries

2020… It is ironic to me that the number often associated with perfect sight is 2020 – given how unclear everything seems this year. As a kid I remember feeling so proud when the nurse announced that I had 2020 vision after a screening I had done in the elementary school gym. My vision was PERFECT!⁣⁣

2020 couldn’t be more imperfect or unclear. We have a virus that is killing people with no end in sight. The leadership of our nation is being disputed and argued over. The economy is a mess, with one of the highest unemployment rates we have ever faced as a nation… Families can’t be near each other. Friends are turning into enemies over politics and race. It is hard to see a future when the present is so clouded. ⁣⁣

I wonder though, is our vision really clouded, or is 2020 actually bringing things into focus, like glasses do?

⁣⁣During this season of financial lack, separation from loved ones, and the racism and hatred that we see in the world, I have had to force myself to take a good hard look at everything up close and personal. When I look out into the world and see things I don’t like, am I just complaining about it and tossing up my hands? Or am I looking at myself with 2020 vision? Am I letting all the ugliness in myself be revealed to myself so that I can make a permanent change in ME, which will radiate out to the world? Because that’s the thing about seeing things perfectly – you don’t just get to see the beautiful parts, you see the trash piles too… And man… There was a lot of trash in my ideologies, in my priorities, in the way that I see and interact with myself… There was a whole lot of trash…⁣⁣

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what is going on in the world at large if we as individuals are covering up trash heaps in our character. Perhaps all this alone time we have had, and all the gunk that is being pulled out of America’s closet isn’t a result of bad vision – maybe it is a sign that we are finally seeing things perfectly, exactly how they are, ugliness and all, so we can finally make the changes necessary to live in a truly beautiful world.⁣

When I was in college I had a crazy dream.  In the dream I was in the main library and everyone was staring at me.  I looked down and realized I was totally naked!!!  Naturally this made me VERY uncomfortable; I frantically looked for something to cover myself with.  There was nothing in the library, so with infinite dream wisdom (haha) I ran OUTSIDE where a road construction crew – all men, were working on the road.  When they saw a naked co-ed running down the street naked they did what all normal men would do, they stopped working and watched!!  As I stood there in a panic I noticed about half a block down the street there was a blanket laying on a bench.  Immediately in front of me there was a cumbersome orange construction barrel.  In that moment I had to decide if I should endure one more minute of embarrassment and run for the blanket, OR if I should hop into the cumbersome orange barrel.

One option would cover me immediately and make me feel better NOW.  The other would require a few more moments of discomfort, but would ultimately allow for ease of movement and not cause any chaffing between point A and point B.

Naturally, I chose the barrel…

The dream ended with me very awkwardly lugging a giant orange construction barrel around, smashing my toes every time I stopped…  Sore arms… Skin, raw from the fiberglass…  But hey!  At least I wasn’t naked anymore, right??  So much better than a blanket…………

That is exactly what we do in life.  We rush to cover up our mess and end up with something that is not ideal.  That concept covers every area of our life.  You feel raw after a bad relationships so you rush the healing and dive for the first man that pays you any attention – he is an orange barrel.  You are overweight and you know that you need to workout but you had a really stressful day so instead of taking a walk to de-stress you grab a bag of chips and plop on the couch – food is an orange barrel.   You never learned coping skills and have a toxic relationship with your mother, you used to lean on the high certain drugs gave you to numb the emotions long enough to tolerate her, but this time she was too much, so you went ahead and took the pills – drugs are an orange barrel. We are faced with putting in the work to heal and cover ourselves the right way,  (through honest assessment, acceptance of how we are contributing to the problem, hard work to re-wire mindsets, and insisting on healthy boundaries with ourselves and others), or dive head first into whatever situation makes us feel better in that moment, ultimately distracting ourselves from healing…

Being vulnerable scares us, we don’t like the core of who we are to be left out in the open and most of the time we are willing to do whatever to feel better NOW – even if it means it will cause us more pain in the long run.  We worry that our raw nakedness is ugly.  We don’t want people to see that!

What if people seeing our nakedness is the only real way to truly cover ourselves properly?  There is something deeply healing and therapeutic when you allow people to see you, when you stand there and say yep!  This is me.  Emotional stretchmarks, psychological cellulite and all!  You don’t necessarily need to stand naked in front of the emotional equivalent of an entire road construction crew…  But finding someone that you let in is crucial.

I encourage you, instead of diving into the closest barrel, find community!  Be honest with someone who will love you and encourage you to walk down the mental, emotional, and spiritual streets of your life “naked” for just a few more steps!  Those relationships will lend themselves to true healing and you will end up wrapped in a blanket of wellness that will better serve you than whatever quick fix to emotional wellness that you find laying around.  And maybe, just maybe, that community will bring the blanket to you and you won’t be naked for nearly as long as you thought!

Definitely beats squashed toes and a fiberglass rash that comes from an orange barrel…

James 5:16 – 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Hebrews 10:24-25 – 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obedience.  Yuck.  That has never been a word I have liked much – I mean, even as a small child when you had to obey it usually involved doing something opposite of what you actually wanted to do, right?  I remember being so annoyed when my mom would interrupt what I was doing to send me to do even the simplest task.  The difference between obeying your parents and obeying God is 9 times out of 10 when you obey your parents your life is easier, when you obey God it may actually be harder!

In July of 2017 I found out my husband had been having not one, but 6, affairs.  Six.  He had actually brought one of the women into my home while I was out of town and had sex with her there.  3 of the affairs were ongoing…  He was telling each woman that he was leaving me and was going to be with them.  None of them knew about each other.  I was devastated…

Now know this!  My personality is not one to take that kind of thing lying down.  You cheated on me, then you can get your stuff and get on out of my house!  I do not deserve this nonsense and I am not going to tolerate it for another moment!!  THAT is my personality…  In the days following the affair as I cried out to God and pleaded with him for direction all I kept hearing in my spirit and through the Word of God was, “forgive him…”  My response to the Lord was, “Forgive him and kick his butt out of my house?!  Because surely you do NOT mean forgive him and let his lying, cheating, no good for nothing behind stay here?!” But God didn’t mean forgive him and kick him out.  He meant forgive him and try to reconcile…

Despite how I was feeling I was obedient and I assumed that because I was obedient that things would start looking up!  After all, God hates divorce right?  He is a God that heals!  He is a God that wants families to work and to thrive, so God was going to fix everything…

Wrong.  Things just got worse and worse.  Even after I found out I was pregnant with our son, he continued to cheat on me.  I moved into my own place and still had hope of reconciling but it just never got better.

So was I wrong when I heard God say that I needed to forgive him and stay?  By staying after I found out about things initially I basically subjected myself to a year and a half of other women, of lies, of tears, of broken hopes and promises.  Had I misheard God?  Was I wrong in my obedience?

We have this idea that if we are obedient then the result will be whatever we, in our human mind, imagine it to be.  That the outcome is going to be ideal – according to US.  Unfortunately that isn’t the case.

In 1st Kings you will see the story of Elijah.  God sends Elijah to tell King Ahab that because of Ahab’s choices God was going to send a drought, and not just any drought – but the mother of all droughts!  King Ahab was a bad dude, and I doubt that delivering this news to the king was high on Elijah’s list of things to do, but he marched in there and delivered the message.  Elijah was obedient.

In our human mind you would think that since God told Elijah to deliver the message all would be well for Elijah, but the very next thing God tells Elijah is to RUN, run for his LIFE to a cave in the Ravine of Kerith.  The name Kerith means “cut off,” so God didn’t only tell him to run for his life, he told him to run and hide to a place completely cut off from everything…  There wasn’t exactly a hoppin foodie scene at the Ravine of Kerith so God promised to send ravens to bring Elijah food, and he told Elijah he could drink from the brook there.  1 Kings 17:7 it says “sometime later the brook dried up.”  Things kept getting worse! Now his source of hydration was gone.  Elijah ends up going to a village and meeting a widow who gives him some food and her son drops dead… Naturally the widow blames Elijah.

This guy just can’t catch a break!  Can you imagine the private conversations Elijah may have wanted to have with God?  “Listen, homie… You told me to drop a bomb on Ahab – one of the meanest most evil men who has ever lived, and I did it!!  Now I am eating bird scraps, dying of dehydration, and being blamed for offing a widows son… What was the point of me doing what you say?!  My life is getting worse!”

I can totally relate to Elijah.  I was screaming to God!  “You told me to stay so why aren’t things getting better?!  Swallowing my pride is hard, God!  Praying for my husband is hard!  People think I am a fool for keeping my husband around, and now I am pregnant, alone, and he isn’t choosing his wife and child over his own issues…”

Thing’s didn’t get any better and I am divorcing him.  The amazing thing is, when I step back and look at the big picture I can see God’s faithfulness to me even in the mess.  Before my husband insisted we separate, God dropped a fantastic job in my lap – one I didn’t have before, making the most money I have made in my adult life.   He kept me from getting STDs while my husband was sleeping around.  He gave me some of the most supportive friends I have ever had in my life – people I wouldn’t have known were how they are if I hadn’t needed them.  During this season I have learned a totally new and transformative way to pray, praying the word of God over myself and my children.  If I hadn’t needed God so desperately I wouldn’t have grown so close to Him.  I could go on and on about how faithful God has been to me, and I KNOW it is because I was obedient.

Also, our life is a ministry.  My husband may not have chosen to change his behavior and he didn’t choose our marriage, but I can say with absolute confidence that he knows what true love looks like and he knows what it means to have someone demonstrate that love no matter what.  He had never experienced that before.  If I claim to want to be like Christ, sometimes that requires crucifying what makes sense in our finite minds and being obedient – even if it doesn’t make sense…

Oh, and Elijah?  God used him to bring the widows son back to life, and teach some sorcerers a powerful lesson.  He was also one of two men in history to never die…  He was taken to heaven in a chariot of fire.

Obedience has its perks after all…

 

“You never care what anyone thinks about you…”  I have heard that over and over for as far back as I can remember.   It’s not that I don’t care what people think – I very much do, its more that I want to do what I want to do MORE than I care what people think…  Sometimes that stick-to-ited-ness has served me well.  Other times it has gotten me into a whole lot of trouble.

Like the time I was married to a very nice young man, then met a gorgeous, exotic, soccer player (ok – so he was an undocumented immigrant line cook), and ended up divorced and pregnant with said line cook’s baby…  I did what I wanted and didn’t care what anyone thought about it.  Yes – there is a whole lot more to the story, but the short end of it is I saw something I had to have and regardless of how uncomfortable I made everyone around me, I was going to have it!  I was a misfit…

The definition of a misfit is “a person whose behavior or attitude sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way.”  Uncomfortably conspicuous…  I assure you when I told my parents that I was getting a divorce and was pregnant by an illegal Mexican named Jose, I was definitely uncomfortably conspicuous!

We all have times in our lives when we have been uncomfortably conspicuous to those around us.  Times when hell or high water we are going to do EXACTLY what we want to do.  Maybe the thing we want to do is done in secret…  Maybe we do it loud and proud, like a giant middle finger to anyone who dares disagree with us!  We are all misfits.  My question is, why are we more comfortable being a misfit when it comes to doing “bad” things than we are when it comes to doing good things?

When I rededicated my life to Jesus, I looked back over so many of the choices I made and thought to myself, ‘ I can NEVER let anyone know about these things…  I will make people so uncomfortable, they won’t want to be around me.’  Yes!  God had forgiven me.  Yes!  There is no condemnation in Christ.  But I was a misfit!  My plan was to be thankful for the salvation, get my act together, and never ever speak of the mess again!  Slowly, as God brought true healing to my heart, I felt Him saying “it’s time to talk about all of the things I delivered you from…”  That terrified me because I knew that once again I would be set apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way.

You see, truth is uncomfortable.  Me admitting that I am a redeemed adulterer, a forgiven fornicator, a woman that can use her mistakes to help other women know that – regardless of what they have done, they are still worth something and deserve more, makes me uncomfortably conspicuous to the pious, religious people of our day.  People are very uncomfortable with a God that forgives and redeems “big” sins, because if He can bring me out of my mess, He may expect them to walk out of theirs…

That is my goal.  To show people that if I can turn away from the lifestyle I used to live, and be forgiven, they can too.  It may make people uncomfortable but I don’t care what people think.  I am still a misfit and I am 100% o.k. with that…

Revelation 12:11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

 

I am going to go ahead at tell you straight out of the gate that I am not an expert on anything.  I don’t have any fancy degrees in psychology.  I have never been to seminary.  Lord knows any education I have on human emotion and behavior come straight from the school of life!  I seem to have a master’s degree in a group of courses called “The Hard Way,” because that is how I have had to learn most of my lessons…  So why should you read this?  Let me continue… I decided to write / video this blog for all of you out there who have also graduated from the school of “Wow, THAT was a horrible decision.”  For you women who have all the right intentions, who long to grow and be more than you are or were, but who seem to consistently make wrong choices.  I am writing to women with three ex husbands, the members of team “four baby-daddies,” the former (and possibly current) hooker…  I am writing for all of you who think that because of the choices you have made, whether those choices were made five years or ten minutes ago, you are worthless…  This blog isn’t for the “good girls” – though I would love for them to read as well, it’s for the misfits and misunderstood. If that’s you, I am writing to tell you that you are not worthless!  You are loved by God and that HE has a plan for you!!!

You might be reading that and think, “Yeah I have heard that before but that just isn’t possible.  If you knew the things I have done in my life you would know that He wouldn’t want to save me!  And even if He saves me and forgives me, He will never use me because why would he want to use someone as screwed up as me to accomplish anything for HIM?!”  Or you may be thinking, “Easy for you to say!  Pretty, middle class, white girl with a good job, nice car and a dog…  You have no idea what it feels like to be me!”  To that I say, don’t judge a book by its cover….  I have been married and divorced twice before I was 30, and am in the process of getting divorced a third time (not because I wanted to but because my husband had multiple affairs and I deserve better).  I have three kids by three different dads, one of which is not any of my ex husband’s biologically.  I have lied and cheated people to survive.  I have slept with literally hundreds of men in my life, some of them for money.  I have been a cam internet model…  The list of stupidity goes on and on…  When I say I can relate to whatever you are going through I truly mean WHATEVER.  So when I tell you that I know that God not only forgives and loves you, but that He also wants to use you to accomplish amazing things for His glory?  I know it is true because I know the things He has forgiven me for and delivered me from.  I know the opportunities He has given me to minister to others using the “bad” things from my past as a way to reach out and love others.  Most importantly I know that God does NOT hold our past against us and that He blesses us in ways we don’t deserve because once we are His, the past is gone in His eyes…

For now, that is all I will say.  Just know that everything I post on here is me sharing my heart, my life, my experiences, and my deliverance with you.  Not because I am proud of my past – there is little in my past to be proud of, but because my desire is to show you that God has a plan and a purpose for you. He knows everything you have ever done, even the secret things, and He loves you.  He is seeking you and calling your name.  When you answer Him, He will not only change your heart, He is willing to change your life!!!!!

Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “Plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you HOPE and a FUTURE.”