Date Posted: 11:51:00 01/20/05 Thu
Author: Kathy
Subject: Okay, here goes - Part One
Thanks for all reading the post about the boy who lived as a direct result of believing prayer. It sets the stage for what’s next.
I am not going to exactly tell you all where I am headed. I’d rather you just read and take the journey with me and we’ll all end up at the end together. How’s that sound?
So here goes:
In October of 1993, my husband and I and our whole Sunday school class went on a couples retreat. There were about 50 couples, and we knew most of them quite well from being in small groups together at church with them over the years.
The meeting got underway, and at the start of the second session, after the prayer, the man doing the meeting just stopped and looked up. He scanned the audience and finally he said, “There is a woman here who has been through horrors. When she was younger, she encountered things you and I could not even imagine. She has been abused physically, sexually, mentally, and spiritually.” He paused. “If you will come forward, the Lord is telling me he wants to set you free from your past right now. He wants to heal your broken heart. He wants to reveal himself to you.”
At the very end of the meeting two days later, the man said, “Ladies and gentlemen, no one came forward during this entire time but I know this woman is in this room. God has laid her on my heart. All I can tell you is, whoever you are, you need to be set free. Jesus wants to set you free. But you need help from someone who knows what you have been through and knows how to free you from it.”
I knew almost all the couples and there was no one there with that kind of background. If there had been, it would have come up in conversations in our small groups. I just honestly thought the guy was way out in left field.
We all said goodbye to each other and went home.
Driving home, looking out the window, a realization just dawned on me. The reason no one had come forward was, I was that woman! I was floored. I didn’t see myself as having been unduly harmed by the Family because there were so many awful things that I missed. I didn’t see myself as having a broken heart. I started to think back to the words he had used and I was dumbfounded. Is that really how God saw me? If it was, God saw me very differently from the way I saw myself. I was silent all the way home as I thought about it.
Two years later, I met a woman who was not quite so invitational about it as the man had been in 1993. She had a lot of spiritual gifts including discernment, intercession and faith, and she told me, “Honey, I’d like you to come to my house this week and let me pray for you.” When I showed up, she had two other women there and the three of them prayed over me and for me the entire afternoon. While she was praying, she said to me, “Kathy, the Holy Spirit is telling me that you need to repent for joining the cult.” Again, I was so taken aback. Didn’t we “forsake all” to join the cult? Didn’t we believe for a long time that we were part of God’s end-time army? Didn’t we do more than any other group in the world to witness to people? Weren’t we wholly dedicated? Wasn’t “winning souls to Jesus” the most important thing to us in the cult? But I trusted her connection with God, because I saw her fruit, and this is something you will learn about me. I don’t listen to anyone ever anywhere until I know what their fruit is. I don’t care how beautifully they speak or how many thousands of people they have following them, I just look at the fruit of their life and the fruit of their lips and the fruit of their actions and that tells me who they are. This woman had so much fruit on her tree in terms of lives she was helping to change through the love of God, you couldn’t see the branches, and that’s how I KNEW that she was speaking the truth.
So there was my second shock. God was telling me that I could not move on in my Christian walk until I repented. Boy, was that a lot to swallow. 9 years after leaving the cult, I still had not come to terms with my motives for joining and had not realized I needed to repent. But by faith, I repented and I renounced every single thing about the COG.
It was very interesting to me to observe that other people who had a strong connection with God saw me very differently from the way I saw myself.
To be continued …
This is a new site for those who believe in Jesus. If you want to know the rest of Kathy's story, here is the link:
http://www.voy.com/187869/