Last Friday I went to a service that my good friend Sister Deborah was having called Women of Faith Women of Valor. It was a sweet and encouraging intimate meeting of women at our local Center Church on Lopez Island. The Church sits on a hill with a cemetery in the center of the Island in the same valley as my family farm of 26 years, and is a familiar place filled with magic and peace that has been a destination ever since I came to Lopez for the first time at age nine. My father owns some plots there and I will be buried there next to my parents and Steve one day, with a view of the valley that has always been a home where I have found peace and inspiration the majority of my life.

Deborah started the service with a song and a testimony, we read some scripture and Tamara sang some beautiful songs about love. At the end of the service we practiced something Deborah calls ‘Coming to the Altar’ and every sweet and God loving lady in the place was prayed over as we placed hands on them and all gave intention and praise to their paths. Deborah saved me for last as I had put forth earlier in the service that I wished to be cleansed and healed from the demons and darkness that still seem to live in my body and continues to torment my spirit and life. Deborah, Linda, Martha and Candice laid their hands on me as Candace verbalized my prayer to Jesus and asked for healing and light to enter my life. The words rolled from her and came shooting forth as she was channeled by the Holy Spirit and the love and light came through her as tears cascaded down my face, I felt the pain well up in me, pour down my face and leave me through the bodies of those holding and touching me. Deborah’s hands were trembling as they cupped my face and I felt an ache and pain in my neck, the top of my head that I used to smash into the wall, and after we had thoroughly asked for the light to enter my being and all of the darkness to leave my body, I felt more sensation where hands had been laid.

Linda approached me after the prayer and spoke words that validated my pain as I felt loved and held by Jesus and all of these women. Linda said that I have been through major suffering as she could feel it coming out of me and pass though her, as it exited my body. She not only validated me, she felt what had been inside of me as she acted as a vessel of love and healing. I can’t explain the additional love that entered my being. God, Linda and the other women knew and understood what I have been alone with for so many years.

I believe I have more work to do with the great physician, Jesus Christ, but I can say and know that I am changed forever. I have found a known and found sense of worship that I have been sent for a couple of years now, however I stand at a new beginning now that I will never come back from. I believe repenting and healing is all I can do to have this weight lifted. I myself had forgotten what I had seen, and Linda and God had me remember, because I had just accepted that it was in me, that this is who I was and who I had become. Yet there is more hope than I could even imagine. Here I am now at your doorstep, Lord, and I wish for you to absorb and lift the weight that weighs on my heart. Thank you friends for your prayer and devotion, and thank you Jesus for you everlasting love and ability to care for and lift my burden.